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2. Essays. First Series. Sketches. 

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5. English Traits. and Other Papers. With a 

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Copyright, 1855, 
By PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO. 

Copyright, 1867, 1876, and 1878, 
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, 
By EDWARD W. EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1897, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., IT. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company. 






POEMS FROM THE WRITINGS OF 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
By GEORGE H. BROWNE 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL PIECES. 

t Concord Hymn 1 

• Freedom 2 

„ Sacrifice 2 

. Voluntaries 3 

./Heroism 5 

Easy to match what others do 6 

• Boston Hymn 6 

„ Boston 10 

II. NATURE. 

^ Nature 16 

\^ The Snow-Storm 17 

S The Titmouse 18 

April 21 

> May-Day 22 

The Humble-Bee . . . . . . . . 32 

, My Garden 35 

Two Rivers 38 

Sea-Shore 39 

Waldeinsamkeit 42 

-• The Apology 44 

Woodnotes 45 

The Song of the Pine-Tree 52 

The World-Soul 54 

monadnoc from afar 59 

III. LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

Each and All 60 

The Rhodora 62 

The Problem 63 

The Romany Girl 67 

Days 69 

Forerunners 70 

Sursum Corda 72 



iv CONTENTS. 

To J. W """ . .73 

Forbearance 74 

Etienne de la Boece 75 

Friendship . . . 77 

Good-Bye 78 

Character . ' 80 

Terminus 81 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 

To the biographies referred to in the notes the following may- 
be added on account of the bibliographies appended to them : 
Alex. Ireland's (1882) and Dr. Richard Garnett's (Great Wri- 
ters Series, 1888). The Second Supplement to Poole's Index 
(1887-1891), Fletcher's Index to General Literature (1893), 
The Annual Literary Index (1892-), and The Cleveland Cumu- 
lative Index to Periodicals (1896-), will furnish later articles. 
The best may be found under the names Alcott, Arnold, Bartol, 
Benton, Burroughs, Chadwick, Chapman, Clarke, Conway, Cranch, 
Everett, Frothingham, Furness, Hale, Harris, Hawthorne, Hedge, 
Higginson, Howells, James, Morley, Norton, Sanborn, Stedman, 
Thayer, Underwood, Whipple, and Woodbury. 



ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES. 

Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887), J. Elliot 
Cabot. 

Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), Moncure D. 
Conway. 

Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and Philo- 
sophy (1882), George Willis Cooke. 

E. W. E., Emerson in Concord (1889), Edward Waldo Em- 
erson. 

O. W. H., Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Men of Letters, 
1885), Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

xii, 115, Emerson's Works, Riverside edition, volume xii, page 
115. For convenience in identifying the references, the contents 
of each volume are given on the next two pages. With the dates 
appended, the list may serve as a concise chronological literary 
biography. In Mr. Cabot's Memoir, 710 ft\, may be found a 



COMPLETE WORKS. v 

chronological list of all of Emerson's Lectures and Addresses, 
with references to volume and page if published in his collected 
writings, or with short abstracts if still unpublished. 



COMPLETE WORKS, RIVERSIDE EDITION. 

i. Nature and Addresses (1847), p. 13, Nature (1836) ; 81, 
American Scholar (1837) ; 117, Divinity Address (1838) ; 
149, Literary Ethics (1838) ; 181, Method of Nature (1841) ; 
215, Man the Reformer (1841) ; 245, Lecture on the Times 
(1841) ; 277, The Conservative (1841) ; 309, The Transcenden- 
talist (1842) ; 341, Young American (1844). 

ii. Essays : First Series (1841), p. 7, History ; 45, Self-Reli- 
ance ; 89, Compensation ; 123, Spiritual Laws ; 159, Love ; 181, 
Friendship ; 207, Prudence ; 231, Heroism ; 249, Over-Soul ; 
279, Circles ; 301, Intellect ; 325, Art (1836). 

iii. Essays: Second Series (1844), p. 7, Poet ; 47, Experience; 
87, Character ; 115, Manners ; 151, Gifts ; 161, Nature ; 189, 
Politics ; 213, Nominalist and Realist ; 237, New England Re- 
formers. 

iv. Representative Men (1850) p. 7, Uses of Great Men ; 39, 
Plato ; 78, Plato, New Readings ; 89, Swedenborg ; 141, Mon- 
taigne ; 179, Shakespeare ; 211, Napoleon ; 247, Goethe. 

v. English Traits (1855). 

vi. Conduct of Life (1860), p. 7, Fate; 53, Power; 83, Wealth; 
125, Culture ; 161, Behavior ; 191, Worship ; 231, Considera- 
tions by the Way ; 265, Beauty ; 291, Illusions. 

vii. Society and Solitude (1870), p. 7, Society and Solitude; 21, 
Civilization ; 39, Art ; 61, Eloquence ; 99, Domestic Life ; 131, 
Farming ; 149, Works and Days ; 179, Books ; 211, Clubs ; 237, 
Courage ; 265, Success ; 297, Old Age. 

viii. Letters and Social Aims (1876), p. 7, Poetry and Imagi- 
nation ; 77, Social Aims ; 107, Eloquence ; 131, Resources ; 149, 
The Comic ; 167, Quotations and Originality ; 195, Progress of 
Culture ; 223, Persian Poetry ; 255, Inspiration ; 283, Great- 
ness ; 305, Immortality. 

ix. Poems (1847, 1 1867, ' 1876, 2 1883 3 ). 

x. Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883), p. 7, Demonol- 
ogy (1839) ; 33, Aristocracy (1848) ; 69, Perpetual Forces 
(1877) ; 91, Character (1866) ; 123, Education ; 157, The 



vi COMPLETE WORKS. 

Superlative (1882) ; 175, The Sovereignty of Ethics (1878) ; 
207, The Preacher (1867) ; 229, The Man of Letters (1863) ; 
247, The Scholar (1876) ; 275, Plutarch (1871) ; 305, Historic 
Notes of Life and Letters in New England ; 349, The Chard on 
Street Convention (1843) ; 355, Ezra Ripley ; 371, Mary Moody 
Emerson (1869) ; 405, Samuel Hoar (1856) ; 419, Thoreau, 
(1862) ; 453, Carlyle (1848). 

xi. Miscellanies (1883), p. 7, The Lord's Supper (1882); 31, 
Historical Discourse at Concord (1835) ; 99, Address, Soldiers' 
Monument, Concord (1867) ; 129, Address, West India Eman- 
cipation (1844) ; 177, War (1838) ; 203, Fugitive Slave Law 
(1854) ; 231, Assault on Sumner (1856) ; 239, Affairs in Kan- 
sas (1856) ; 249, Relief John Brown's Family (1859) ; 257, 
John Brown, Speech at Salem (1860) ; 265, Theodore Parker 
(1860) ; 275, American Civilization (1862) ; 291, Emancipation 
Proclamation (1862) ; 305, Abraham Lincoln (1865) ; 317, Har- 
vard Commemoration Speech (1865) ; 323, Editor's Address, 
Mass. Quarterly Review (1847) ; 335, Woman (1855) ; 357, 
Address to Kossuth (1852) ; 363, Robert Burns (1859) ; 373, 
Walter Scott (1871) ; 379, Organization of the Free Religious 
Association (1867) ; 385, Annual Meeting of the Free Religious 
Association (1869) ; 393, Fortune of the Republic (1878). 

xii. Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers (1893), p. 3, 
Natural History of Intellect (1870-71) ; 61, Memory (1870-71); 
83, Boston (1861) ; 113, Michael Angelo (1837) ; 143, Milton 
(1838) ; 175, Papers from The Dial (1840-44) : 177, Thoughts 
on Modern Literature ; 201, Walter Savage Landor ; 212, 
Prayers ; 219, Agriculture of Massachusetts ; 225, Europe and 
European Books ; 237, Past and Present ; 249, A Letter ; 260, 
The Tragic ; 273, General Index. 

In this volume, the papers on Boston, Michael Angelo, and 
Milton are of special interest to the users of this little book; the 
last, written in 1835, may serve to-day as a most admirable auto- 
biography of Emerson. "Are we not the better," it concludes, 
" are not all men fortified by the remembrance of the bravery, 
the purity, the temperance, the toil, the independence, and the 
angelic devotion of this man, who, taking counsel of himself, en- 
deavored, in his writings and in his life, to carry out the life of 
man to new heights of spiritual grace and dignity, without any 
abatement of its strength ? " 



INTRODUCTION. 

Although the whole body of Emerson's verse barely 
fills one moderate-sized volume, — a small twelfth of his 
published works, — a constantly growing number of readers 
are learning to value the poems even more highly than the 
prose. When a friend, soon after the publication of May- 
Day, expressed to Emerson his pleasure in the book, adding 
that, much as he valued the essays, he cared more for the 
poems, Emerson laughingly answered : " I beg you always 
to remain of that opinion." He then went on more seriously 
to say, that he himself liked his poems best, because it was 
not he who wrote them ; because he could not write them 
by will ; he could say, " I will write an essay ; I can breathe 
at any time," he added, "but I can whistle only when the 
right pucker comes." l 

That was thirty years ago. To-day there is an increas- 
ing number, not only of those who value the verse more 
highly than the prose, but also of those who value it as the 
highest and most truly representative American contribu- 
tion to literature. Emerson's fellow-poets were the first to 
recognize his superiority. Dr. Holmes has acknowledged 
it in his appreciative biography; Lowell, loyal "liegeman," 
as he signed himself, has testified to the spiritual and intel- 
lectual passion of Emerson's verse, " some of which is as 
exquisite as any in the language ; " and Whittier, speaking 
one day of modern writers, said : " I regard Emerson as 
foremost in the rank of American poets ; he has written 
better things than any of us." 2 In the fifty years that have 
now just elapsed since the publication of Emerson's first 

1 Emerson in Concord. E. W. E., p. 230. 2 PickariTs Life, ii, 696. 



viii INTRODUCTION. 

volume of verse, the general reader, too, has learned, chiefly 
through Emerson himself, to appreciate his poetry. What 
Emerson said of Wordsworth in a lecture on Books in Bos- 
ton, 1864, may fitly be applied to himself : " This rugged 
countryman walks and sits alone for years, assured of his 
sanity and his inspiration, sneered at and disparaged, yet 
no more doubting the fine oracles that visited him than if 
Apollo had visibly descended to him on Helvellyn. Now, 
so few years after, it is lawful in that obese England 1 to 
affirm, unresisted, the superiority of his genius." 2 The 
present generation of readers cannot fail to see, in the recep- 
tion which Emerson's first volume met, chiefly mere " curi- 
osities of criticism ; " 8 tradition, however, is strong, and 
many young people are prone to believe in advance that, 
like Caesar's bridge, Emerson's poetry is hard. When they 
begin to read the poems in the arrangement of the author- 
ized editions and find no narrative, no individual charac- 
ters, little metrical variety, and occasional faulty rhyme and 
halting rhythm, " Why, this is different from any other 
poetry we ever read," they exclaim ; " we don't understand 
it, and we don't like it." And when the same old criticism 
is revived in their own day in a more persuasive form, from 
more authoritative sources, 4 inexperienced readers are too 

1 Or " in this great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious America." Em- 
erson to Carlyle, July 31, 1841 ; " this mendicant, curious, peering, 
itinerant, imitative America." vii, 172. 2 Cabot, 790. 

3 As a specimen, the extravagances of Prof. Francis Bowen's aca- 
demic ohtuseness will be amusing to the most uncritical of to-day. 
North American Review (1847), 64: 402. 

4 Matthew Arnold, 1883, and John Morley, 1884 : " Delicate and 
adroit artisans, in whose eyes poetry is solely a piece of design, may 
find the awkwardness of Emerson's verse a bar to right comprehension 
of its frequent beauty and universal purpose. I am not sure but one 
must be of the poet's own country and breeding to look quite down 
his vistas and by-paths ; for every American has something of Emer- 
son in him, and the accent of the land was in the poet." Emerson, I 
fear, would not have felt complimented by this suggestion of Mr. 
Stedman, but I suspect it is not without truth. Prof. J. B. Thayer's 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

prone to assume that the difficulty is with Emerson and not 
with them, and they give up discouraged. To prevent this 
untimely discouragement, and to present Emerson's poetry 
in such order and with such brief illustration as shall tide 
the beginner over any early obstacles, and bring him to his 
own, is the main object of the following selections. 

Emerson's prose is the best elucidator of his verse, for 
more truly may it be said of the lover of Emerson than 
Emerson said of the lover of Milton : " He reads one sense 
in his prose and in his metrical compositions." * Whatever 
the obstacles that the form of his verse may present at first, 
they will disappear with the reader's growing familiarity 
with the poet's leading thoughts. Emerson had no affecta- 
tion of ruggedness and obscurity ; whatever ruggedness 
there was, was a part of his mind, as inseparable from his 
thought as his skin from his body. At the worst, its 
importance as an obstacle has been greatly exaggerated. 
Many of Emerson's poems are charged with a patriotism so 
electrifying, transfigured by an imagination and diction so 
splendid yet simple, and uttered withal in a tone so pro- 
phetic and so authoritative, that their meaning and their 
beauty must possess you ; and in all of Emerson's verse 
there is such challenge to the keenest intellect and profound- 
est moral sentiment, that often, just because you cannot tell 
exactly all it means, it haunts your memory with quite as 
much fascination as the music of more melodious verse, to 
any meaning of which you are indifferent. Emerson's aim 
was not merely to delight but to invigorate his reader ; 2 to 
see the naked truth himself, and to find the perfect universal 
expression for it, and, by publishing it, to be free of it, in 
order that he and his reader, too, might find deeper truth. 
" For all men live by truth," he says, 3 " and stand in need 
of expression. . . . The man is only half himself ; the other 

letter, appended to his Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, Boston, 
18S4, is one of the best things called out by the controversy arising 
from Arnold's famous lecture. 
1 xii, 172. a Cf. Cabot, 626 ; v, 243 ; vi, 183. 3 iii, 11. 



x INTRODUCTION. 

half is his expression. Notwithstanding this necessity to 
be published," he adds, " adequate expression is rare," and 
as early as 1838 wrote : " I am not sufficiently master of the 
little truth I see, to know how to state it in forms so gen- 
eral as shall put every mind in possession of my point of 
view." l Here is the secret of the difficulty of Emerson ; 2 
and because his " songs of laws and causes " 3 are so heavily 
laden with thought, and the expression is so general and so 
impersonal, it is important that the young reader should, 
from Emerson's prose, learn something of his " point of 
view " before he can read aright or measure fairly. 

What Emerson says of his own inadequacy, however, 
must not be taken too literally ; for his ideal was so high 
that he had to confess, " I look in vain for the poet whom I 
describe." 4 In the preface to Parnassus (1874), his volume 
of selections of the choicest poems in the language, he says : 
" The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they 
induce ; and to them, of all men, the severest criticism is 
due." To no poet did Emerson apply severer criticism 
than to himself, for no one ever had a higher conception 
of the character of the poet and the function of poetry. 
No writer has ever given more adequate expression to that 
conception ; and if we could explain why that expression is 
more adequate in the poems Saadi, Beauty, Merlin, Frag- 
ments on the Poet and the Poetic Gift, than in the prose 
essays on Nature, the Poet, Art, and Poetry and Imagina- 
tion, we should have plucked out the heart of his mystery. 
Since the matter is so important, however, it is well to pre- 
sent an outline of his theory of poetry ; and, that the state- 
ment may be as brief and authoritative as possible, it will 
be best to let Emerson make it in his own inimitable words. 5 

1 Conway, 209. Cf . xii, 38. 

2 Cf. Alcott's difficulty with Emerson's conversation, B. W. Emer- 
son: an Estimate of his Character and Genius (Boston, 1888), p. 40. 

3 Cabot, 479. 4 iii, 40. 

5 References to the prose works are given in order that the student 
and teacher may read the extracts with their proper context. See p. v. 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

" I am born a poet," he writes in 1835 to Miss Jackson 
during their engagement, — "of a low class without doubt, 
yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, 
be sure, is very husky, and is for the most part in prose. 
Still I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover 
of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and 
specially of the correspondences between these and those." 1 
This is the key-note of Emerson's aim and power, struck 
the year before his first publication (Nature, 1836) ; all 
other expressions of his ideal are but variations on this note. 
Poetry, he says, is the perpetual endeavor to express the 
spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life 
and reason which cause it to exist. 2 Possessed by a heroic 
passion, the poet uses matter as symbols of it. The sen- 
sual man conforms thoughts to things ; the poet conforms 
things to his thoughts. 3 Things tally with thoughts, because 
they are at bottom the same ; knowledge is the perception 
of this identity. We first are the things we know, and then 
we come to speak and to write them, — translate them into 
the new sky-language we call thought. And it is the nat- 
ural logic, and not syllogisms, that can help us to understand 
and to verify our experience. 4 The poet discovers that 
whatrfnen value as substances have a higher value as sym- 
bols, — that Nature is the immense shadow of man. 5 The 
primary use of fact is low ; the secondary use, as it is a 
figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. 6 A 
happy symbol is a sort of evidence that your thought is just. 
If you agree with me, I may yet be wrong ; but if the elm- 
tree thinks the same thing, — if running water, if burning 
coal, if crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions, say 
what I say, — it must be true. 7 Thus a good symbol is the 
best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands. 8 

1 Cabot, 236. 2 viii, 22 ; ii, 17 ; viii, 71. 

3 i, 56. 4 Natural History of Intellect, Cabot, 639 ; xii, 226. 

5 viii, 27 ; iii, 18, 19 ; xii, 39 ; iv, 56. 6 viii, 16. 7 Cf. iii, 30 ; xii, 5. 
8 viii, 18 ; read the suggestive entry in his Journal, Cabot, 293 ; and 
the beginning of The Poet, ix, 253. 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer saw the splendor of 
meaning that plays over the visible world ; knew that a tree 
had .another use than for apples, and corn another than for 
meal, and the ball of the earth than for tillage and roads, 
— that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the 
mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all 
their natural history a certain mute commentary on human 
life. 1 The poet must believe in his poetry. 2 Homer, Mil- 
ton, Hafiz, Herbert, Swedenborg, Wordsworth are heartily 
enamoured of their sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know 
that this correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper 
than they can penetrate, defying adequate expression ; 
that it is elemental, 3 or in the core of things. Philosophy 
will one day be taught by poets. The poet is the natural 
attitude : he is believing ; the philosopher, after some strug- 
gle, having only reasons for believing. 4 Veracity, therefore, 
is that which we require in poets, — that they shall say how 
it was with them, and not what might be said. And the 
fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere. 5 Much 
that we call poetry is but polite verse. A little more or less 
skill in whistling is of no account. 6 Our poets are men of 
talents who sing, not children of music. The argument is 
secondary, the finish of the verses is primary [with them]. 
It is not metres, however, but a metre-making argument, 
that makes a poem, — the thought and the form are equal 
in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought 
is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought ; he has 
a whole new experience to unfold ; he will tell how it was 
with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. 7 

1 iv, 206 ; it is this spirit that is infused through even the simplest 
of Emerson's Nature poems. Cf. The Apology, 17-20, p. 45. 

2 viii, 33 ; ef. iii, 180 ; iv, 181 ; viii, 217. 

3 viii, 33, the very word that Dr. Holmes uses so aptly to characterize 
Emerson's poetry, p. 340. Cf. viii, 45 ; ii, 270, 271 ; iii, 37. 

4 xii, 13 ; i, 59. 

5 viii, 33 ; iii, 11 ; ii, 196 ; x, 252 ; v, 242, 243. 

6 viii, 73 ; vi, 151. 7 iii, 15 ; i, 103 ; Saadi, ix, 116. 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

The reason why we set so high a value on any poetry — as 
often on a line or a phrase as on a poem — is that it is a 
new work of Nature, as a man is. It must be new as foam 
and as old as the rock. But a new verse comes once in a 
thousand years. 1 

It is not surprising, therefore, that we often overhear 
Emerson saying that he looks in vain for the poet he de- 
scribes. What, then, was the fascination that metrical com- 
position had for hint ? Again let Emerson answer in his 
own words : " Music and rhyme are among the earliest 
pleasures of the child, and, in the history of literature, 
poetry precedes prose. Every one may see, as he rides on 
the highway through an uninteresting landscape, how a little 
water instantly relieves the monotony ; no matter what ob- 
jects are near it, — a gray rock, a grass-patch, an alder- 
bush, or a stake, — they become beautiful by being reflected. 
It is rhyme to the eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to 
the ear. 2 I amuse myself often as I walk," he writes in his 
Journal (1853), "with humming the rhythm of the decasyl- 
labic quatrain, or of the octosyllabic or other rhythms, and 
believe these metres to be organic, or derived from our hu- 
man pulse, 3 and to be, therefore, not proper to one nation, 
but to mankind. But I find a wonderful charm, heroic, 
and especially deeply pathetic or plaintive in the cadence, 
and say to myself, Ah, happy if one could fill the small 
measures with words approaching to the power of these 
beats ! Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune, things in 
pairs and alternatives, and in higher degrees we know the 
instant power of music to change our mood and give us its 
own ; and human passion, seizing these constitutional tunes, 
aims to fill them with appropriate words, or marry music to 
the thought, believing that for every thought its proper mel- 
ody or rhyme exists, though the odds are immense against 
our finding it." 4 Let poetry, then, pass, if it will, into music 

1 viii, 43, 192 ; x, 256, 257. 2 viii, 47. 

3 "The normal respiratory measure." O. W. H., 335. 

4 E. W. E., 231. Cf. 1'i'in ; and Imagination, viii, 49. 



xiv INTRODUCTION. 

and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We 
do not put watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and 
rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure 
architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. 
Substance is much, but so is form much. The poet, like a 
delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, 
air-born, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of 
soap and water. 1 " Moreover, rhyme, being a kind of music, 
shares this advantage with music, that it has a privilege of 
speaking truth which all Philistia is unable to challenge. 
Music is the poor man's Parnassus. With the first note of 
the flute or horn, or the first strain of a song, we quit the 
world of common sense and launch on the sea of ideas and 
emotions ; we pour contempt upon the prose you so mag- 
nify ; yet the sturdiest Philistine is silent. The like allow- 
ance is the prescriptive right of poetry. You shall not 
speak ideal truth in prose uncontradicted ; you may in 
verse." 2 

In verse, therefore, Emerson secured an expression more 
nearly adequate to the idea in his own mind. " To lectur- 
ing he could reconcile himself, and even find in it a good 
side; but it was, after all, an expedient, not the mode of ut- 
terance to which he aspired. That was verse, not so much, 
I think," says his biographer and literary executor, " from 
a direct impulse toward rhythmical expression as for the 
sake of freer speech." 8 " The poet knows that he speaks 
adequately," says Emerson, "then only when he speaks 
wildly, or ' with the flower of his mind.' " 4 The " flower- 
ing" of most of the thoughts in the essays occurs in the 
poems ; and the method of elucidation adopted in this selec- 
tion consists chiefly in setting the prose and verse expres- 
sions of the same idea side by side. 

Emerson's poetic creation may be divided into three dis- 

1 viii, 54. 2 viii, 53. 8 Cabot, 479. 

4 iii, 30 ; read the rest of this instructive passage. 



INTRODUCTION. xv 

tinct periods : the first, the youthful, academic, imitative 
period, ending with the Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1834 ; the 
second, the period of revolt, overlapping the first somewhat, 
and ending with the publication of the first volume of poems 
in 1847 ; the third, the period of maturity, reflection, and 
quietly biding his time. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, in the 
sketch of his father, gives an interesting account of the char- 
acteristics of each period, and of the influences operative in 
each. Of the poetry of the first period, there was little 
that gave promise of the poetry of the last ; and little is now 
read except Good-Bye Proud World, Webster (ix, 312), and 
a few personal poems, written in ill-health, amid the losses 
and disappointments of his early ministry. But before that 
period was over, Emerson had begun his great poem, The 
Discontented Poet ; he was beginning to feel and know his 
power. From his first visit to Europe he returned invigo- 
rated and self-possessed, and declared his intellectual inde- 
pendence in Nature, 1836. The next ten years was the 
period of his greatest productivity, just as the ten years 
following - the publication of Lyrical Ballads were Words- 
worth's most prolific years. Both were periods of revolt 
from traditions of the past. Both poets suffered from the 
extravagance with which they first asserted their own inde- 
pendence. " Rhyme, " wrote Emerson in his Journal, 
June 27, 1839, " not tinkling rhyme, but grand, Pindaric 
strokes as firm as the tread of a horse ; rhyme that vindi- 
cates itself as an art, the stroke of the bell of a cathedral ; 
rhyme which knocks at prose and dulness with the stroke of 
a cannon-ball ; rhyme which builds out into chaos and old 
night a splendid architecture to bridge the impassable, and 
call aloud on all the children of morning that the Creation 
is recommencing. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not 
suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom." 

" Great is the art. 

Great be the manners, of the bard. 
Hi' shall not his brain encumber 



xvi INTRODUCTION. 

With the coil of rhythm and number ; 

But, leaving- rule and pale forethought, 

He shall aye climb 

For his rhyme. 
' Pass in, pass in,' the angels say, 
' In to the upper doors, 

Nor count compartments of the floors, 

But mount to paradise 

By the stairway of surprise.' " 

Merlin, ix, 107. 

The public was not familiar enough then with Emerson's 
" point of view " to accept this surprising manner of the 
bard. The reception of the volume of 1847 was a disap- 
pointment to him. But he was wiser than his critics. He 
bided his time. 1 

"The verses of the late period (after 1847)," his son 
says, " were long kept by him ; and in fortunate days, as he 
crooned the lines to himself, walking in Walden woods, the 
right words sjirang into place. Almost all the poems of the 
later volume (1867) had been in years greatly changed and 
mellowed from the song struggling for expression, first 
written in the note-book on his return from the woods, 
where I believe that nearly all his poems had their birth." 2 
But this changing and mellowing was not a mere polishing, 
to add beauty to the original thought : it was a renewed 
search after the most vivid thought ; for, according to Em- 
erson's theory, " a vivid thought brings the power to paint 
it, and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force 
of its projection. 8 Ask the fact for the form. For a verse 
is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in 
a case ; the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its 
contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body, 
and we measure the inspiration by the music. In reading 

1 Note the passage in The Poet beginning " Not yet, not yet" ix, 256. 

2 E. W. E., 231, 232. Compare Two Rivers, p. 38, and Sea-Shore, 
p. 39, with their earlier forms given in the Appendix, p. 87. 

3 x , 225. 



INTRODUCTION. xvii 

prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags ; but, in 
poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought 
mounts, the expression mounts." x 

With this passage and the passage from " Parnassus " in 
mind, we may safely leave the question of form and sub- 
stance to Emerson himself. His lectures, when first written 
and delivered, showed much more obviously coherent struc- 
ture than after he had condensed them unsparingly for pub- 
lication. But just as fuller appreciation of the thought of 
his essays detects a logical connection that even the author 
himself could not have pointed out, so readers of Emerson's 
verse are beginning to suspect that he had the finest touch 
when he chose to apply it. " It becomes a question whether 
his discords are those of an undeveloped artist or the sud- 
den craft of one who knows all art and can afford to be on 
easy terms with it. . . . Not seldom a lyrical phrase is the 
more taking for its halt, — helped out, like the poet's own 
speech, by the half-stammer and pause that were wont to 
precede the rarest or weightest word of all." 2 With what 
surprising illumination that word fell upon the hearer, 
Lowell has told us. 3 " No man, in my judgment," he re- 
peats, " ever had a greater mastery of English. Emerson's 
instinct for the best word was infallible. Wherever he 
found one, he froze to it, as we say in our admirable vernac- 
ular. I have sometimes found that he had added to his 
cabinet the one good word in a book he had read." Like 
Montaigne's, his words are vascular and alive. Cut these 
words and they would bleed. 4 In those elements of poetry, 
then, more important than rhyme and rhythm : prophetic 
insight, moral sanity, imaginative felicity and audacity of 
speech, transfigured by feeling, — the accent of the Great 
Maker, — Emerson stands first among American poets. 

1 viii, 56 ; vii, 53. 

2 Stedman, Poets of America, pp. 135, 159. 

3 Cf. also Cabot, (ilrl). 

4 iv, 160 ; cf. viii, 7.' J. 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

" The passive master lent his hand 
To the vast soul that o'er him planned." 1 

For poetry, Emerson believed, was all written before 
time was ; and, whenever we are so finely organized that 
we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, 
we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them 
down, but we lose ever and anon a word or verse and sub- 
stitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. 
The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences 
more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imjDerfect, be- 
come the songs of nations. 2 

Few poets ever heard more clearly those primal warblings 
than Emerson, and his transcripts are sometimes perfect. 
In the following selections, the more simple, concrete, and 
spontaneous of these transcripts are placed first ; then the 
Nature poems ; and, lastly, the poems on Life, — beauty, 
friendship, self-reliance, character, etc. Since, however, 
Emerson saw in the panorama of Nature chiefly emblems 
of his thought, — 

" Melting matter into dreams, 
And whatever glows or seems, 
Into substance, into laws," 3 — 

the distinction between poems on Nature and on Life is not 
to be insisted upon. With the exception of Freedom, Vol- 
untaries, May- Day, and Woodnotes, the poems are printed 
intact. The Threnody, the most spontaneous, passionate 
lyrical elegy ever inspired by sorrow, cannot be divided, 
and, like Monadnoc, is too long for insertion. The little 
poem on Heroism is attracted forward by its heroic com- 
panionship ; with full illustration, however, it may serve as 
a suggestive example, introduced rather early, of Emer- 
son's unique faculty of oracular condensation : into the last 
four verses are concentrated the substance of the essays on 
Self-Reliance, Heroism, Society and Sulitude, and Character. 

1 See The Problem, 47, note, p. GG. 2 hi, 13, 28, 29. 3 ix, 271. 



I. PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL PIECES. 



CONCORD HYMN: 

SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT, 
APRIL 19, 1836. 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 

Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
And fired the shot heard round the world. 

The foe long since in silence slept ; 5 

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps ; 

And Time the ruined bridge has swept 

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. 

On this green bank, by this soft stream, 

We set to-day a votive stone ; 10 

That memory may their deed redeem, 
When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 

Spirit, that made those heroes dare 
To die, and leave their children free, 

Bid Time and Nature gently spare 15 

The shaft we raise to them and thee. 

3. Does this shaft mark the spot where the farmers stood, or 
where the British fell ? Read Emerson's brief Address at the 
Hundredth Anniversary of the Concord Fight, April 19, 1875, 
the last piece written out with his own hand. {Cooke, 182.) 
See Appendix, p. 83. What does the most familiar line in the 



PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 



FREEDOM. 

Freedom's secret wilt thou know ? — 
Counsel not with flesh and blood ; 
Loiter not for cloak or food ; 
Right thou feelest, rush to do. 



SACRIFICE. 

Though love repine, and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without reply, — 
" 'T is man's perdition to be safe, 

When for the truth he ought to die." 

poem really mean ? Compare with it this sentence from the 
Address: "The thunderbolt falls on an inch of ground, but the 
light of it fills the horizon," — a thought to which Emerson had 
previously given a poetic expression that now may well be ap- 
plied to the author of this perfect poem, " a model for all of its 
kind" (0. JF. #., 332): — 

" His instant thought a poet spoke, 
And filled the age his fame ; 
An inch of ground the lightning strook, 
But lit the sky with flame." ix, 277. 

4. "Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is al- 
ways right." ii, 236. "Nature hates calculators; her methods 
are saltatory and impulsive." iii, 70. " ' Time,' say the Indian 
Scriptures, ' drinketh up the essence of every great and noble 
action which ought to be performed, and which is delayed in 
the execution.' " American Civilization, Riv. Lit. No. 42, p. 87. 
xi, 288. See Appendix, p. 83. 

4. " I have a note of a conversation that occurred in our first 
company the morning before the Battle of Bull Run. At a 
halt in the march, a few of onr boys were sitting on a rail fence 
talking together whether it was right to sacrifice themselves. 
One of them said, ' he had been thinking a good deal about it 
last night, and he thought one was never too young to die for a 



VOLUNTARIES. 



VOLUNTARIES. 



In an age of fops and toys, 

Wanting wisdom, void of right, 

Who shall nerve heroic boys 

To hazard all in Freedom's fight, — 

Break sharply off their jolly games, 5 

Forsake their comrades gay 

And quit proud homes and youthful dames 

For famine, toil and fray ? 

Yet on the nimble air benign 

Speed nimbler messages, 10 

That waft the breath of grace divine 

To hearts in sloth and ease. 

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 

When duty whispers low, Thou must, is 

The youth replies, I can. 

principle.' " Address at the Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument 
in Concord, April 19, 1867 (xi, 108). Read the whole of it. Cf. 
x, 246. " To Emerson, more than to all other causes together, did 
the young martyrs of our Civil War owe the sustaining strength 
of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their 
lives." (Lowell.) Cabot, 628. See Appendix, p. 84. 

13-16. " These lines, a moment after they were written, seemed 
as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years." 
O. W. H., 241. Cf. The Preacher, x, 216. 

"It is easy to recall the mood in which our young men, 
snatched from every peaceful pursuit, went to the war. Many 
of them had never handled a gun. They said, ' It is not in 
me to resist. I go because I must. It is a duty which I shall 
never forgive myself if I decline. I do not know that I can 
make a soldier. I may be very clumsy. Perhaps I shall be 
timid ; but you can rely on me. Only one thing is certain: I 
can well die, but I cannot afford to misbehave.' " xi, 320. Har- 
vard Commemoration Speech, July 21, 1865. 



PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 

O, well for the fortunate soul 

Which Music's wings infold, 

Stealing away the memory 

Of sorrows new and old ! 20 

Yet happier he whose inward sight, 

Stayed on his subtile thought, 

Shuts his sense on toys of time, 

To vacant bosoms brought. 

But best befriended of the God 25 

He who, in evil times, 

Warned by an inward voice, 

Heeds not the darkness and the dread, 

Biding by his rule and choice, 

Feeling only the fiery thread 30 

Leading over heroic ground, 

W r ailed with mortal terror round, 

To the aim which him allures, 

And the sweet heaven his deed secures. 

Peril around, all else appalling, 35 

Cannon in front and leaden rain 

Him duty through the clarion calling 

To the van called not in vain. 

Stainless soldier on the walls, 
Knowing this, — and knows no more, — 40 
Whoever fights, whoever falls, 
Justice conquers evermore, 
Justice after as before, — 
And he who battles on her side, 
God, though he were ten times slain, . 45 

Crowns him victor glorified, 
Victor over death and pain. 



HEROISM. 



HEROISM. 

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, 

Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 

Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons ; 

Thunder-clouds are Jove's festoons, 

Drooping oft in wreaths of dread, 5 

Lightning-knotted round his head ; 

The hero is not fed on sweets, 

Daily his own heart he eats ; 

Chambers of the great are jails, 

And head-winds right for royal sails. 10 

8. In reading this poem, be careful to bring out the contrasts 
by proper intonation. Be not too matter-of-fact, — like one of 
Mr. Emerson's worthy but literal-minded townswomen, who, on 
her way home from his lecture on Plato, remarked to a neigh- 
bor, " if those old heathen really did such things as Mr. Emer- 
son said they did, the less said about them the better." What 
Emerson had said was: "Plato especially has no external bio- 
graphy. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of 
them. He ground them into paint" — a poetical exaggeration 
not unlike that in the text. What is the prose equivalent ? 
Cf. " The Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and 
valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself." ii, 114. 

9. The great man must sit alone. Cf. Saadi, ix, 114 ; i, 168, 
169 ; vi, 150. " Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely 
as himself. Solitary was he ? Why, yes ; but his society was 
limited only by the amount of brain Nature appropriated in that 
age to carry on the government of the world," vii, 13 ; see xii, 51, 
52; or, Chambers of the truly great are often jails in the end, 
as in the case of Socrates, Galileo, Columbus, etc. See vii, 258. 

10. " Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, 
danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have over- 
come. Without war, no soldiei's; without enemies, no hero. 
Not Antoninus but a poor washerwoman said : ' The more 
trouble, the more lion; that 's my principle.' " vi, 242. Cf. ii, 114; 
viii, 219; xii, 55. See Appendix, p. 81. 



PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 



EASY TO MATCH WHAT OTHERS DO. 

Easy to match what others do, 
Perform the feat as well as they ; 
Hard to out-do the brave, the true, 
And find a loftier way. 



BOSTON HYMN * 

READ IN MUSIC HALL, JANUARY 1, 1863. 

The word of the Lord by night 
To the watching Pilgrims came, 
As they sat by the seaside, 
And filled their hearts with flame. 

God said, I am tired of kings, 5 

I suffer them no more ; 

Up to my ear the morning brings 

The outrage of the poor. 

Think ye I made this ball 

A field of havoc and war, 10 

* On the 22d of September, President Lincoln issued his pro- 
clamation that slavery would be abolished on the 1st of January, 
1863, in those States which should then be in rebellion against 
the United States. The same month, Emerson, at a meeting in 
Boston, expressed his approval in the Speech on the Emancipation 
Proclamation, — Riv. Lit. No. 42, pp. 90, 100, xi, 293 ft., — and 
at the " Jubilee Concert," when the Emancipation went into effect, 
read this poem by way of prologue. " It is a rough piece of 
verse, but noble from beginning to end." 0. W. H., 240. Cf. 
Conway, 47, 314. 

2. See Appendix, p. 85. 



BOSTON HYMN. 7 

Where tyrants great and tyrants small 
Might harry the weak and poor ? 

My angel, — his name is Freedom, — 
Choose him to be your king ; 
He shall cut pathways east and west 15 

And fend you with his wing. 

Lo ! I uncover the land 

Which I hid of old time in the West, 

As the sculptor uncovers the statue 

When he has wrought his best ; 20 

I show Columbia, of the rocks 
Which dip their foot in the seas 
And soar to the air-borne flocks 
Of clouds and the boreal fleece. 

I will divide my goods ; 25 

Call in the wretch and slave : 
None shall rule but the humble, 
And none but Toil shall have. 

I will have never a noble, 

No lineage counted great ; 30 

Fishers and choppers and ploughmen 
Shall constitute a state. 



28. See 61-64, 69-72. Remember that this was written in 
1862. Read Emerson's courageous defence of labor at the be- 
ginning of American Civilization, Riv. Lit. No. 42, p. 76, xi, 275, 
delivered in January, 1862, in Washington, while yet slavery 
had a hold upon the national capital and the Emancipation Pro- 
clamation was six months off. 



8 PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 

Go, cut down trees in the forest 

And trim the straightest boughs ; 

Cut down trees in the forest 35 

And build me a wooden house. 

Call the people together, 

The young men and the sires, 

The digger in the harvest field, 

Hireling and him that hires ; 40 

And here in a pine state-house 
They shall choose men to rule 
In every needful faculty, 
In church and state and school. 

Lo, now ! if these poor men 45 

Can govern the land and sea 
And make just laws below the sun, 
As planets faithful be. 

And ye shall succor men ; 
'T is nobleness to serve : 50 

Help them who cannot help again : 
Beware from right to swerve. 

I break your bonds and masterships, 
And I unchain the slave : 

50. " Ich Dien, I serve, is a truly royal motto." American Civ- 
ilization, p. 76, xi, 275. " The founders of Massachusetts did not 
try to unlock the treasure of the world except by honest keys of 
labor and skill. They knew, as God knew, that command of 
nature comes by obedience to nature ; that reward comes by 
faithful service ; that the most noble motto was that of the 
Prince of Wales, — ' I serve,' — and that he is greatest who 
serves best." Boston, 1861, xii, 105. See Appendix, p. 85. 



BOSTON HYMN. 

Free be his heart and hand henceforth i 

As wind and wandering wave. 

I cause from every creature 

His proper good to flow : 

As much as he is and doeth, 

So much he shall bestow. e 

But, laying hands on another 
To coin his labor and sweat, 
He goes in pawn to his victim 
For eternal years in debt. 

To-day unbind the captive, c 

So only are ye unbound ; 

Lift up a people from the dust, 

Trump of their rescue, sound ! 

Pay ransom to the owner 

And fill the bag to the brim. 70 

Who is the owner ? The slave is owner, 
And ever was. Pay him. 

O North ! give him beauty for rags, 
And honor, O South ! for his shame ; 
Nevada ! coin thy golden crags 75 

With Freedom's image and name. 

Up ! and the dusky race 

That sat in darkness Ions', — 

Be swift their feet as antelopes, 

And as behemoth strong. 80 

57-60. See Worship, vi, 210, 211, 216; Spiritual Laics, ii, 143-148. 
69. See Appendix, p. 85. 



10 PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 

Come, East and West and North, 
By races, as snow-flakes, 
And carry my purpose forth, 
Which neither halts nor shakes. 

My will fulfilled shall be, 
For, in daylight or in dark, 
My thunderbolt has eyes to see 
His way home to the mark. 



BOSTON.* 

SICUT PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS. 

The rocky nook with hill-tops three 
Looked eastward from the farms, 

And twice each day the flowing sea 
Took Boston in its arms ; 

The men of yore were stout and poor, 5 

And sailed for bread to every shore. 

And where they went on trade intent 

They did what freemen can, 
Their dauntless ways did all men praise, 

The merchant was a man. 10 

The world was made for honest trade, — 
To plant and eat be none afraid. 

87, 88. What poetical quality do you conceive these lines to 



* Read in Faneuil Hall, on December 16, 1873, the Centennial 
Anniversary of the Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor. 
This poem was begun several years before the war, but was not 
finished until the occasion of its delivery, when the piece was 
entirely remodelled. Some of the suppressed stanzas are given 
in the Riverside Edition. 

11. But all trade is not always honest. See Man the Reformer, 



BOSTON. 11 

The waves that rocked them on the deep 

To them their secret told ; 
Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep, is 

" Like us be free and bold ! " 
The honest waves refused to slaves 
The empire of the ocean caves. 

Old Europe groans with palaces, 

Has lords enough and more ; — 20 

We plant and build by foaming seas 

A city of the poor ; — 
For day by day could Boston Bay 
Their honest labor overpay. 

We grant no dukedoms to the few, 25 

We hold like rights, and shall ; — 

Equal on Sunday in the pew, 
On Monday in the mall, 

1841, i, 220 ff . " The ways of trade are grown selfish to the 
borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the 
borders) of fraud." Cf. iii, 244, and see The World-Soul, 16, 
note, p. 54. Yet " the greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, 
huckstering Trade." Works and Days, vii, 159. " Thus a man 
may well spend many years of life in trade. It is a constant 
teaching of the laws of matter and mind. No dollar of property 
can be created without some direct communication with nature, 
and, of course, some acquisition of knowledge and practical force." 
Education, x, 128. Cf. Emerson on money, Cabot, 415; iii, 221; 
vi, 100, 122 ; vii, 110 ff.; ii, 221; i, 362. See Appendix, p. 86. 
19. " Of old things, all are over old; 

Of good things, none are good enough ; — 
We '11 show that we can help to frame 
A world of other stuff." 
Motto to Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New Eng- 
land, x, 305. 
25. " European critics regret the detachment of the Puritans 



12 PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 

For what avail the plough or sail, 

Or land or life, if freedom fail ? 30 

The noble craftsman we promote, 

Disown the knave and fool ; 
Each honest man shall have his vote, 

Each child shall have his school. 
A union then of honest men, 35 

Or union never more again. 

The wild rose and the barberry thorn 

Hung out their summer pride, 
Where now on heated pavements worn 

The feet of millions stride. 40 

Fair rose the planted hills behind 

The good town on the Bay, 
And where the western hills declined 

The prairie stretched away. 

What care though rival cities soar 45 

Along the stormy coast, 
Penn's town, New York and Baltimore, 

If Boston knew the most ! 

They laughed to know the world so wide ; 
The mountains said, " Good-day ! so 

" We greet you well, you Saxon men, 
Up with your towns and stay ! " 

to this country without aristocracy; which a little reminds me 
of the pity of the Swiss mountaineer when shown a handsome 
Englishman : « What a pity he has no goitre ! ' " Boston, xii, 101. 
49. Cf. " That each should in his house abide, 

Therefore was the world so wide." ix, 298. 



BOSTON. 13 

The world was made for honest trade, — 
To plant and eat be none afraid. 

"For you," they said, "no barriers be, 55 

For you no sluggard rest ; 
Each street leads downward to the sea, 
Or landward to the west." 

O happy town beside the sea, 

Whose roads lead everywhere to all ; go 

Than thine no deeper moat can be, 

No stouter fence, no steeper wall ! 

Bad news from George on the English throne ; 
" You are thriving well," said he ; 
" Now by these presents be it known 65 

You shall pay us a tax on tea ; 
'T is very small, — no load at all, — 
Honor enough that we send the call." 

" Not so," said Boston, " good my lord, 

We pay your governors here 70 

63. " Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad 
enough." viii, 220. 

"We had many enemies and many friends in England, but 
our only benefactor was King George the Third. The time had 
arrived for the political severance of America, that it might 
play its part in the history of this globe ; and the way of Divine 
Providence to do it was to give an insane king to England. In 
the resistance of the colonies, he alone was immovable on the 
question of force. England was so dear to us that the colonies 
could only be absolutely united by violence from England, and 
only one man could compel resort to violence. . . . He insisted on 
the impossible ; so the army was sent. America was instantly 
united and the nation born." Emerson's Address <it. (he Unveiling 
0/ (he " Minute Man," April 10, 1875. Cooke, 183. 



14 PATRIOTIC AND OCCASIONAL. 

Abundant for their bed and board, 

Six thousand pounds a year. 
(Your Highness knows our homely word,) 

Millions for self-government, 

But for tribute never a cent." 75 

The cargo came ! and who could blame 

If Indians seized the tea, 
And, chest by chest, let down the same 

Into the laughing sea ? 
For what avail the plough or sail, so 

Or land or life, if freedom fail ? 

The townsmen braved the English king, 

Found friendship in the French, 
And honor joined the patriot ring 

Low on their wooden bench. 85 

O bounteous seas that never fail ! 

O day remembered yet ! 
O happy port that spied the sail 

Which wafted Lafayette ! 
Pole-star of light in Europe's night, . 90 

That never faltered from the right. 

Kings shook with fear, old empires crave 

The secret force to find 
Which fired the little State to save 

The rights of all mankind. 95 

But right is might through all the world ; 

Province to province faithful clung, 
Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled, 

Till Freedom cheered and joy-bells rung. 



BOSTON. 15 

The sea returning day by day 100 

Restores the world-wide mart ; 
So let each dweller on the Bay 

Fold Boston in his heart, 
Till these echoes be choked with snows, 
Or over the town blue ocean flows. 105 

Let the blood of her hundred thousands 

Throb in each manly vein ; 
And the wits of all her wisest 

Make sunshine in her brain. 
For you can teach the lightning speech, no 

And round the globe your voices reach. 

And each shall care for other, 

And each to each shall bend, 
To the poor a noble brother, 

To the good an equal friend. 115 

A blessing through the ages thus 

Shield all thy roofs and towers ! 
God with the fathers, so with us, 

Thou darling town of ours ! 

119. " Here stands to-day, as of yore, our little city of the 
rocks ; here let it stand forever on the man-bearing granite of 
the North ! Let her stand fast by herself ! She has grown 
great. She is filled with strangers, but she can only prosper by 
adhering to her faith. Let every child that is born of her, and 
every child of her adoption, see to it to keep the name of Boston 
as clean as the sun ; and in distant ages her motto shall be the 
prayer of millions on all the hills that gird the town, 'As with 
our Fathers, so God be with us ! ' Sicut patribus, sit deus 
nobis ! " Boston, 18G1, xii, 111. See Appendix, p. 86. 



II. NATURE. 



NATURE. 

Winters know 

Easily to shed the snow, 

And the untaught Spring is wise 

In cowslips and anemones. 

Nature, hating art and pains, s 

Baulks and baffles plotting brains ; 

Casualty and Surprise 

Are the apples of her eyes ; 

But she dearly loves the poor, 

And, by marvel of her own, 10 

Strikes the loud pretender down. 

For Nature listens in the rose 

And hearkens in the berry's bell 

To help her friends, to plague her foes, 

And like wise God she judges well. 15 

Yet doth much her love excel 

To the souls that never fell, 

To swains that live in happiness 

And do well because they please, 

Who walk in ways that are unfamed, 20 

And feats achieve before they 're named. 

14. Compare The Walk, note to Woodnotes, 35, p. 47. 

17. To such as approach the high ideal of conduct expressed 
in the address on The Method of Nature, August 11, 1841, i, 
183 ff. 

21. Cf. Success, vii, 276, 277, and Appendix, p. 85, on Heroism, 
iii, 96. 



THE SNOW-STORM. 17 



THE SNOW-STORM. 



Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, 
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, 
Seems nowhere to alight : the whited air 
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, 
And veils the farm-house at the garden's end. 5 
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet 
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit 
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 
In a tumultuous privacy of storm. 

Come see the north wind's masonry. 10 

Out of an unseen quarry evermore 
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer 
Curves his white bastions with projected roof 
Kound every windward stake, or tree, or door. 
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work 15 

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he 
For number or proportion. Mockingly, 
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths ; 
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn ; 
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, 20 

Maugre the farmer's sighs ; and at the gate 
A tapering turret overtops the work. 
And when his hours are numbered, and the world 
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, 
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art 25 
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, 

1. What conspicuous change in metre do you observe ? 
18. Cf. Parian marble, — why so called ? 
21. Why not "despite," or some other English word ? See 
Friendship, ii, 183. 



18 NATURE. 

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, 
The frolic architecture of the snow. 



THE TITMOUSE. 

You shall not be overbold 

When you deal with arctic cold, 

As late I found my lukewarm blood 

Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood. 

How should I fight ? my foeman fine 5 

Has million arms to one of mine : 

East, west, for aid I looked in vain, 

East, west, north, south, are his domain. 

Miles off, three dangerous miles, is home ; 

Must borrow his winds who there would come. 10 

Up and away for life ! be fleet ! — 

The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, 

Sings in my ears, my hands are stones, 

Curdles the blood to the marble bones, 

Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense, 15 

And hems in life with narrowing fence. 

Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep, — 

The punctual stars will vigil keep, — 

Embalmed by purifying cold ; 

The winds shall sing their dead-march old, 20 

The snow is no ignoble shroud, 

The moon thy mourner, and the cloud. 

28. Cf . May-Day, 47 ft., p. 24. Select the phrases or epithets 
that seem to you to contribute most to the accuracy, picturesque- 
ness, or simplicity of this description. 

6. What epithet has Emerson just applied to the " fierce arti- 
ficer," snow ? 



THE TITMOUSE. 19 

Softly, — but this way fate was pointing, 
'T was coming fast to such anointing, 
When piped a tiny voice hard by, 25 

Gay and polite, a cheerful cry, 
C/uc-chicadeedee ! saucy note 
Out of sound heart and merry throat, 
As if it said, " Good day, good sir ! 
Fine afternoon, old passenger ! 30 

Happy to meet you in these places, 
Where January brings few faces." 

This poet, though he live apart, 
Moved by his hospitable heart, 
Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort, 35 

To do the honors of his court, 
As fits a feathered lord of land ; 
Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand, 
Hopped on the bough, then, darting low, 
Prints his small impress on the snow, 40 

Shows feats of his gymnastic play, 
Head downward, clinging to the spray. 

Here was this atom in full breath, 
Hurling defiance at vast death ; 
This scrap of valor just for play 45 

Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray, 
As if to shame my weak behavior ; 
I greeted loud my little savior, 
23. Meaning of but ; of anointing, 24 ? 
25. Tiny voice. Compare the phrase, " the thin note of the 
companionable titmouse in the wintry day," — Literary Ethics, 
July 24, 1838 (i, 163), — which, in the Journal of that year, was 
11 the thin note of the titmouse and his bold ignoring of the by- 
stander." E. W. E., GO. A comparison of these two passages 
will be instructive as to Emerson's method of using material in 
his note-books for prose essays. 



20 NATURE. 

" You pet ! what dost here ? and what for ? 
In these woods, thy small Labrador, 50 

At this pinch, wee San Salvador ! 
What fire burns in that little chest 
So frolic, stout and self-possest ? 
Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine ; 
Ashes and jet all hues outshine. 55 

Why are not diamonds black and gray, 
To ape thy dare-devil array ? 
And I affirm, the spacious North 
Exists to draw thy virtue forth. 
I think no virtue goes with size ; 60 

The reason of all cowardice 
Is, that men are overgrown, 
And, to be valiant, must come down 
To the titmouse dimension." 

'T is good-will makes intelligence, 65 

And I began to catch the sense 
Of my bird's song : " Live out of doors 
In the great woods, on prairie floors. 
I dine in the sun ; when he sinks in the sea, 
I too have a hole in a hollow tree ; 70 

And I like less when Summer beats 
With stifling beams on these retreats, 
Than noontide twilights which snow makes 
With tempest of the blinding flakes. 
For well the soul, if stout within, 75 

Can arm impregnably the skin ; 
And polar frost my frame defied, 
Made of the air that blows outside." 

50, 51. Why are these names selected ? Cf. line 48. 
64. What common Elizabethan pronunciation is here required 
by the metre ? 



APRIL. 21 

With glad remembrance of my debt, 
I homeward turn ; farewell, my pet ! so 

When here again thy pilgrim comes, 
He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs. 
Doubt not, so long as earth has bread, 
Thou first and foremost shalt be fed ; 
The Providence that is most large 85 

Takes hearts like thine in special charge, 
Helps who for their own need are strong, 
And the sky dotes on cheerful song. 



APRIL. 

The April winds are magical 

And thrill our tuneful frames ; 

The garden walks are passional 

To bachelors and dames. 

The hedge is gemmed with diamonds, 5 

The air with Cupids full, 

The cobweb clues of Rosamond 

Guide lovers to the pool. 

Each dimple in the water, 

Each leaf that shades the rock 10 

87. What common Latin construction do yon observe ? What 
did the titmouse really do for the poet ? Is there a member of 
your class who could not have told Matthew Arnold ? 

7. " Rosamond, the fayre daughter of Walter, Lord Clifford 
(poisoned by Queen Elian or, as some thought), dyed at Woo- 
stocke [a. d. 1177] where King Henry had made for her a house 
of wonderfull working ; so that no man or woman might come 
to her, but he that was instructed by the king. ... It was com- 
monly said that lastly the queene came to her by a clue of 
thridde or silk, and so dealt with her, that she lived not long 
after." Cf. the ballad of Fair Rosamond in Percy's Reliques. 



22 NATURE. 

Can cozen, pique and flatter, 

Can parley and provoke. 

Goodfellow, Puck and goblins, 

Know more than any book. 

Down with your doleful problems, u 

And court the sunny brook. 

The south-winds are quick-witted, 

The schools are sad and slow, 

The masters quite omitted 

The lore we care to know. 20 



MAY-DAY.* 

Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring, 

With sudden passion languishing, 

Teaching barren moors to smile, 

Painting pictures mile on mile, 

Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths, 5 

Whence a smokeless incense breathes. 

The air is full of whistlings bland ; 

What was that I heard 

Out of the hazy land ? 

Harp of the wind, or song of bird, 10 

17. Cf. Wordsworth's The Tables Turned: — 

" One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can." 

* This poem gives the title to Emerson's second volume of 
poems, May-Day and Other Pieces, published in 1867. 

10. " Echo, the booming of the ice on the pond or river, the 
wind in the pines, and the iEolian harp in his west window, were 
the sounds he best loved." E. W. E., 172. Cf. his poem on 
The Harp, ix, 203, and the Maiden Speech of the JEolian Harp, 



MAY-DAY. 23 

Or vagrant booming of the air, 
Voice of a meteor lost in day ? 
Such tidings of the starry sphere 
Can this elastic air convey. 

Or haply 't was the cannonade 15 

Of the pent and darkened lake, 
Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade, 
Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break, 
Afflicted moan, and latest hold 
Even into May the iceberg cold. 20 

Was it a squirrel's pettish bark, 
• Or clarionet of jay ? or hark 
Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads, 
Steering north with raucous cry 
Through tracts and provinces of sky, 25 

Every night alighting down 
In new landscapes of romance, 
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans 
By lonely lakes to men unknown. 
Come the tumult whence it will, 30 

Voice of sport, or rush of wings, 
It is a sound, it is a token 

ix, 220 ; also Inspiration, viii, 272 ; find similar allusions in 
other works of Emerson. 
11. Cf. Wordsworth's 

" O Cuckoo ! shall I call thee Bird, 
Or but a wandering Voice ? " 

Riv. Lit. No. 70, p. 33. 

13. What was the " music of the spheres " so often alluded to 
by Shakspere and Milton ? Cf. Pericles, V, i, 231; Merchant of 
Venice, V, i, GO-Go, and often. Collect other references. See 
My Garden, 45, note, p. 37. 

28. darkling, not a participle, nor an adjective as in Keats's 
Eve of St. Agnes, xl : " Down the wide stairs a darkling way they 
found." What is it ? Compare the history of the word grovel- 
ling. What do you observe in the rhythm of this verse ? 



24 NATURE. 

That the marble sleej) is broken. 
And a change has passed on things. 

When late I walked, in earlier days, 35 

All was stiff and stark ; 
Knee-deep snows choked all the ways, 
In the sky no spark ; 
Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods, 
Struggling through the drifted roads ; 40 

The whited desert knew me not, 
Snow-ridges masked each darling spot ; 
The summer dells, by genius haunted, 
One arctic moon had disenchanted. 
All the sweet secrets therein hid 45 

By Fancy, ghastly spells undid. 
Eldest mason, Frost, had piled 
Swift cathedrals in the wild ; 
The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts 
In the star-lit minster aisled. 50 

I found no joy : the icy wind 
Might rule the forest to his mind. 
Who would freeze on frozen lakes ? 
Back to books and sheltered home, 
And wood-fire flickering on the walls, 55 

To hear, when, 'mid our talk and games, 
Without the baffled north-wind calls. 
But soft ! a sultry morning breaks ; 
The ground-pines wash their rusty green, 
The maple-tops their crimson tint, 60 

On the soft path each track is seen, 
The girl's foot leaves its neater print. 
The pebble loosened from the frost 
Asks of the urchin to be tost. 
In flint and marble beats a heart, 65 

The kind Earth takes her children's part, 



MAY-DAY. 25 

The green lane is the school-boy's friend, 

Low leaves his quarrel apprehend, 

The fresh ground loves his top and ball, 

The air rings jocund to his call, 70 

The brimming brook invites a leap, 

He dives the hollow, climbs the steep. 

The caged linnet in the spring 
Hearkens for the choral glee, 
When his fellows on the wing 75 

Migrate from the Southern Sea ; 
When trellised grapes their flowers unmask, 
And the new-born tendrils twine, 
The old wine darkling in the cask 
Feels the bloom on the living vine, 80 

And bursts the hoops at hint of spring : 
And so, perchance, in Adam's race, 
Of Eden's bower some dream-like trace 

68. Just so when the Arab lover " sung his sweet regrets and 
told his amulets : " — 

" The summer bird 
His sorrow heard, 

And, when he heaved a sigh profound, 
The sympathetic swallow swept the ground." 

Hermione, ix, 89. 

Just so the poet in The Miracle, ix, 306, gave the theme to 
the woodland singer : — 

"That wood-bird sang my last night's dream, 
A brown wren was the Daniel 
That pierced my trance its drift to tell, 
Knew my quarrel, how and why, 
Published it to lake and sky, 
Told every word and syllable 
In his flippant chirping babble, 
All my wrath and all my shames, 
Nay, God is witness, gave the names." 

Compare The Apology, stanza 4, p. 41; Hamatreya, 6-10, ix, 35. 

81. A quaint German idea that Emerson learned upon a visit 

to Longworth's Catawba wine vaults at Cincinnati. Conway, 366. 



26 NATURE. 

Survived the Flight and swam the Flood, 
And wakes the wish in youngest blood 85 

To tread the forfeit Paradise, 
And feed once more the exile's eyes ; 
And ever when the happy child 
In May beholds the blooming wild, 
And hears in heaven the bluebird sing, 9c 

"Onward," he cries, " your baskets bring, — 
In the next field is air more mild, 
And o'er yon hazy crest is Eden's balmier spring." 

Why chidest thou the tardy Spring ? 
The hardy bunting does not chide ; 155 

The blackbirds make the maples ring 
With social cheer and jubilee ; 
The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee, 
The robins know the melting snow ; 
The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed, 160 

Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves, 
Secure the osier yet will hide 
Her callow brood in mantling leaves, — 
And thou, by science all undone, 
Why only must thy reason fail 165 

To see the southing of the sun ? 

The world rolls round, — mistrust it not, — 
Befalls again what once befell ; 
All things return, both sphere and mote, 

88-93. What difference from the rest of the poem do you 
observe in these verses ? Cf . Matthew Arnold's Discourses in 
America, p. 156. 

160. Why is the sparrow called " prophetic-eyed " ? What 
other names does Emerson give the redwing in this volume ? 

166. It is remarkable how the warm quality of southing satis- 
fies the reader, and makes him forget that it should be northing. 
(E. W. E.) Cf. Funning, vii, 134, 135. 



MAY-DAY. 27 

And I shall hear my bluebird's note, ito 

And dream the dream of Auburn dell. 

April cold with dropping rain 
Willows and lilacs brings again, 
The whistle of returning birds, 
And trumpet-lowing of the herds. 175 

The scarlet maple-keys betray 
What potent blood hath modest May, 
What fiery force the earth renews, 
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues ; 
What joy in rosy waves outpoured iso 

Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord. 

Hither rolls the storm of heat ; 
I feel its finer billows beat 
Like a sea which me infolds ; 
Heat with viewless fingers moulds, 185 

Swells, and mellows, and matures, 
Paints, and flavors, and allures, 
Bird and brier inly warms, 
Still enriches and transforms, 
Gives the reed and lily length, 190 

Adds to oak and oxen strength, 
Transforming what it doth infold, 
Life out of death, new out of old, 
Painting fawns' and leopards' fells, 
Seethes the gulf-encrimsoning shells, 195 

171. Is this an allusion to one of Goldsmith's poems ? Dur- 
ing Emerson's early student years in Cambridge, much youth- 
ful dreaming was probably indulged in on the sunny slopes of 
"Auburn," overlooking the Charles. The region has been made 
familiar by Longfellow and Lowell, and since 1832 has been 
gradually gathered into what is now Mount Auburn Cemetery. 

195. Slowly warms the gulf, so that the shells take on a 



28 NATURE. 

Fires gardens with a joyful blaze 

Of tulips, in the morning's rays. 

The dead log, touched, bursts into leaf, 

The wheat-blade whispers of the sheaf. 

What god is this imperial Heat, 200 

Earth's prime secret, sculpture's seat ? 

Doth it bear hidden in its heart 

Water-line patterns of all art ? 

Is it Daedalus ? is it Love ? 

Or walks in mask almighty Jove, 205 

And drops from Power's redundant horn 

All seeds of beauty to be born ? 

I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth, 21)5 
Stepping daily onward north 
To greet staid ancient cavaliers 
Filing single in stately train. 

ruddier color. It is noticeable that shells from tropical countries 
are highly colored. Contrast Song of Nature, 35 : — 

" Time and Thought were my surveyors ; 
They laid their courses well : 
They boiled the sea, and piled the layers 
Of granite, marl, and shell." ix, 210. 

201. Sculpture's seat, — does the rhyme aid or impede the 
choice of the right word here ? 

203. Like the water-mark in paper, hidden, as the undulating 
shimmer of hot air is to all but careful observers, who notice 
them against contrasting light. (E. W. E.) 

204. Cf. Sea-Shore, 30, p. 40. Dcedalus is " distinctively the 
power of finest human as opposed to Divine workmanship or 
craftsmanship. Whatever good there is, and whatever evil, in 
the labor of the hands separated from that of the soul, is exem- 
plified by his history and performance. In the deepest sense, 
he was, to the Greeks, Jack of all trades, yet Master of none ; 
the real master of every trade being always a God." Ruskin, 
Fors Clavigera, Letter XXIII. For a list of his inventions and 
works, see Aratra PentelicL 206. 



MAY-DAY. 29 

And who, and who are the travellers ? 

They were Night and Day, and Day and Night, 300 

Pilgrims wight with step forthright. 

I saw the Days deformed and low, 

Short and bent by cold and snow ; 

The merry Spring threw wreaths on them, 

Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell ; 305 

Many a flower and many a gem, 

They were refreshed by the smell, 

They shook the snow from hats and shoon, 

They put their April raiment on ; 

And those eternal forms, 310 

Unhurt by a thousand storms, 

Shot up to the height of the sky again, 

And danced as merrily as young men. 

I saw them mask their awful glance 

Sidewise meek in gossamer lids ; 310 

And to speak my thought if none forbids, 

It was as if the eternal gods, 

Tired of their starry periods, 

Hid their majesty in cloth 

Woven of tulips and painted moth. 320 

301. wight, J vie-, conquer : therefore brave, triumpJiing. 

302. This figure of the masking gods was a favorite one with 
Emerson. Cf. Days, p. 69 ; vii, 168 ; xii, 39; and often. Find 
others places where it occurs. 

315. gossamer. Look up the history of this word. What 
seem to you the chief poetical qualities of this passage (295- 
327) ? 

" These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen 
to them and delight in them, as the ' Ancient Mariner ' fastened 
upon the man who must hear him. If any doubter wishes to test 
his fitness for reading them, let him read the paragraph of May- 
Day beginning, — 

" ' 1 saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth.' " O. W- II., 333. 



30 NATURE. 

On carpets green the maskers march 

Below May's well-appointed arch, 

Each star, each god, each grace amain, 

Every joy and virtue speed, 

Marching duly in her train, 325 

And fainting Nature at her need 

Is made whole again. 

Ah ! well I mind the calendar, 
Faithful through a thousand years, 
Of the painted race of flowers, 
Exact to days, exact to hours, 365 

Counted on the spacious dial 
Yon broidered zodiac girds. 
I know the trusty almanac 
Of the punctual coming-back, 
On their due days, of the birds. 370 

I marked them yestermorn, 
A flock of finches darting 
Beneath the crystal arch, 
Piping, as they flew, a march, — 
Belike the one they used in parting 375 

Last year from yon oak or larch ; 
Dusky sparrows in a crowd, 
Diving, darting northward free, 
Suddenly betook them all, 
Every one to his hole in the wall, 3so 

Or to his niche in the apple-tree. 
I greet with joy the choral trains 
Fresh from palms and Cuba's canes. 

365. " He thought that, if waked up from a trance in this 
swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of year it was 
within two days." Thoreau, x, 438. Cf. notes to Woodnotes, 
pp. 46-48, Appendix, pp. 88, 89. 



MA Y-DA Y. 31 

Best gems of Nature's cabinet, 

With dews of tropic morning wet, 355 

Beloved of children, bards and Spring, 

O birds, your perfect virtues bring, 

Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight, 

Your manners for the heart's delight, 

Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof, sgo 

Here weave your chamber weather-proof, 

Forgive our harms, and condescend 

To man, as to a lubber friend, 

And, generous, teach his awkward race 

Courage and probity and grace ! 395 

38G. Compare an earlier version, Riverside Edition, ix, 283: 

" Darlings of children and of bard, 
Perfect kinds by vice unmarred, 
All of worth and beauty set 
Gems in Nature's cabinet ; 
These the fables she esteems 
Reality most like to dreams. 
Welcome back, you little nations, 
Far-travelled in the south plantations ; 
Bring your music and rhyUimic flight, 
Your colors for our eyes' delight : 
Freely nestle in our roof, 
Weave your chamber weatherproof ; 
And your enchanting manners bring 
And your autumnal gathering. 
Exchange in conclave general 
Greetings kind to each and all, 
Conscious each of duty done 
And unstained as the sun." 

Although our modern ornithologists cannot quite " teach us 
what the social birds say when they sit in the autumn council, 
talking together in the trees " (vi, 267), the sympathetic writings 
of Henry Minot, Olive Thome Miller, Frank Bolles, Bradford 
Torrey, John Burroughs, and many others, have, in recent years, 
added new pleasure to the return of the birds, — their science 
has the human side for which Emerson pleaded in the Essay on 
Beauty. 



32 NA TURE. 



THE HUMBLE-BEE.* 

Burly, dozing humble-bee, 

Where thou art is clime for me, 

Let them sail for Porto Rique, 

Far-off heats through seas to seek ; 

I will follow thee alone, 5 

Thou animated torrid-zone ! 

Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer, 

Let me chase thy waving lines ; 

Keep me nearer, me thy hearer, 

Singing over shrubs and vines. 10 

Insect lover of the sun, 

Joy of thy dominion ! 

Sailor of the atmosphere ; 

Swimmer through the waves of air ; 

Voyager of light and noon ; 15 

Epicurean of June ; 

Wait, I prithee, till I come 

Within earshot of thy hum, — 

All without is martyrdom. 

* First published by James Freeman Clarke in his Western 
Messenger, 1838, from the autograph copy, which begins, " Fine 
humble-bee ! Fine humble-bee ! " On Emerson's characteristic 
use of the word " fine," see 0. W. H., 405. Yet the present 
version is a vast improvement. Why ? 

16. Prolong the third syllable almost into two, thus : Epiciire'- 
e-an. Emerson's classic training, which would never allow him 
to lapse into the vulgar pronunciation Lyceum, Museum, etc., 
would have made him shrink from Epicurean. He often read 
melody into a rugged verse. (E. W. E.) What is the philo- 
sophy of what Emerson calls " the indulgent Epicurean " ? Cf. 
" Let the Stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the 
good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite 
is keen." iii. 179. 



THE HUMBLE-BEE. 33 

When the south wind, in May days, 20 

• With a net of shining haze 
Silvers the horizon wall, 
And with softness touching all, 
Tints the human countenance 
With a color of romance, 25 

And infusing subtle heats, 
Turns the sod to violets, 
Thou, in sunny solitudes, 
Rover of the underwoods, 
The green silence dost displace 30 

With thy mellow, breezy bass. 

Hot midsummer's petted crone, 

Sweet to me thy drowsy tone 

Tells of countless sunny hours, 

Long days, and solid banks of flowers; 35 

Of gulfs of sweetness without bound 

In Indian wildernesses found ; 

Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure, 

Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure. 

Aught unsavory or unclean 40 

Hath my insect never seen ; 
But violets and bilberry bells, 
Maple-sap and daffodels, 

40, 41, 52-57. One of the happiest and simplest presenta- 
tions of Emerson's philosophy and life. (E. W. E.) In rightly 
interpreting the philosophy of this " tawny hummer," you must 
remember that Emerson, although he always taught that ever}*- 
wrong is punished and that no moral evil can prosper, looked 
upon evil chiefly as good in the making. " The first lesson of 
history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is 
sometimes a better." vi, 241 ; E. W. E., 244; see Boston, 63, p. 13. 
But u good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute : 



34 NATURE. 

Grass with green flag half-mast high, 

Succory to match the sky, 45 

Columbine with horn of honey, 

Scented fern and agrimony, 

Clover, catchfly, adder' s-tongue 

And brier-roses, dwelt among ; 

All beside was unknown waste, 50 

All was picture as he passed. 

Wiser far than human seer, 

Yellow-breeched philosopher ! 

Seeing only what is fair, 

Sipping only what is sweet, 55 

Thou dost mock at fate and care, 

Leave the chaff, and take the wheat. 

When the fierce northwestern blast 

Cools sea and land so far and fast, 

Thou already slumberest deep ; 60 

Woe and want thou canst outsleep ; 

Want and woe, which torture us, 

Thy sleep makes ridiculous. 

it is like cold, which is the privation of heat." i, 123. There- 
fore, as you remove cold by applying heat, Emerson recom- 
mends ignoring evil, which is negative, only as • an indirect 
recommendation to concentrating upon good, which is positive. 
"Shun the negative side," he says, viii, 96, 134; vi, 188; and 
often. "The good mind chooses what is positive, what is advan- 
cing, — embraces the affirmative." vii, 289. " The affirmative of 
affirmatives is love." xii, 56. " Nerve us with incessant affirma- 
tives. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the 
bad, but chant the beauty of the good." vii, 291. 

"Yet spake yon purple mountain, 
Vet said yon ancient wood, 
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, 
Leads all souls to the Good." The Park, ix, 78. 

What is the name of such philosophy ? See Emerson's letter to 
Carlyle, July 31, 1841. Cf. x, 335, 336 ; Cabot, 204 ; vi, 199. 



MY GARDEN. 35 



MY GARDEN.* 

If I could put my woods in song 
And tell what 's there enjoyed, 
All men would to my gardens throng, 
And leave the cities void. 

In my plot no tulips blow, — 5 

Snow-loving pines and oaks instead ; 

And rank the savage maples grow 

From Spring's faint flush to Autumn red. 

My garden is a forest ledge 

Which older forests bound ; 10 

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, 
Then plunge to depths profound. 

Here once the Deluge ploughed, 
Laid the terraces, one by one ; 

* " The garden at home was often a hindrance and care, but 
soon after his settlement in Concord he bought an estate which 
brought him unmingled pleasure, — first the grove of white pines 
on the shore of Walden, and later the large tract on the farther 
shore running up to a rocky pinnacle (verse 9), from which he 
could look down on the pond itself, and on the other side to the 
Lincoln w r oods and farms ; Nobscot blue in the south, away be- 
yond Fairhaven, and the river gleaming in the afternoon sun." 
E. W. E., 58. Now that the forest is burned away, the ledge 
may be seen from the Fitchburg train, just east of Walden 
station. Of the home garden Emerson writes in his Journal : 
" The young minister did very well, but one day he married a 
wife, and after that he noticed that, though he planted corn 
never so often, it was sure to come up tulips (verse 5), contrary 
to all the laws of botany." E. W. E., 6G. 



36 NA TURE. 

Ebbing later whence it flowed, 15 

They bleach and dry in the sun. 

The sowers made haste to depart, — 

The wind and the birds which sowed it ; 

Not for fame, nor by rules of art, 

Planted these, and tempests flowed it. 20 

Waters that wash my garden side 
Play not in Nature's lawful web, 
They heed not moon or solar tide, — 
Five years elapse from flood to ebb. 

Hither hasted, in old time, Jove, 25 

And every god, — none did refuse ; 
And be sure at last came Love, 
And after Love, the Muse. 

Keen ears can catch a syllable, 

As if one spake to another, 30 

In the hemlocks tall, untamable, 

And what the whispering grasses smother. 

iEolian harps in the pine 

King with the song of the Fates ; 

Infant Bacchus in the vine, — 35 

Far distant yet his chorus waits. 

Canst thou copy in verse one chime 
Of the wood-bell's peal and cry, 

23. The waters of Waklen Pond rise and fall mysteriously, 
regardless of rain or drought. It seems to be fed by secret 
springs and to have a hidden outlet. Cf. " Emerson and his 
Friends in Concord," F. B. Sanborn, New England Magazine, 
December 1890, p. 430. 



MY GARDEN. 37 

Write in a book the morning's prime, 

Or match with words that tender sky ? 40 

Wonderful verse of the gods, 
Of one import, of varied tone ; 
They chant the bliss of their abodes 
To man imprisoned in his own. 

Ever the words of the gods resound ; 45 

But the porches of man's ear 
Seldom in this low life's round 
Are unsealed, that he may hear. 

Wandering voices in the air 

And murmurs in the wold 50 

Speak what I cannot declare, 

Yet cannot all withhold. 

When the shadow fell on the lake, 
The whirlwind in ripples wrote 



41-48. " The Gods talk in the breath of the woods, 

They talk in the shaken pine, 

And fill the long reach of the old sea-shore 

With "(dialogue divine ; 

And the poet who overhears 

Some random word they say 

Is the fated man of men 

Whom the ages must obey." 

The Poet, II, ix, 255. Cf. Poet, iii, 13. 
45. Pan could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd's pipe, 
— silent yet to most, for his pipes make the music of the spheres, 
which, because it sounds eternally, is not heard at all by the dull, 
but only by the mind, xii, 33. Cf. The Song of the Pine-Tree, 
38, p. 53 ; Woodnotes, II, ix, 53 ; the city boy in the October 
woods, vii, 281 ; xii, 26. 



38 NA TUBE. 

Air-bells of fortune that shine and break, 
And omens above thought. 

But the meanings cleave to the lake, 
Cannot be carried in book or urn ; 
Go thy ways now, come later back, 
On waves and hedges still they burn. 

These the fates of men forecast, 
Of better men than live to-day ; 
If who can read them comes at last 
He will spell in the sculpture, " Stay." 



TWO RIVERS * 

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 

Repeats the music of the rain ; 

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain. 

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent : 5 

The stream I love unbounded goes 
Through flood and sea and firmament ; 
Through light, through life, it forward flows. 

I see the inundation sweet, 

I hear the spending of the stream 10 

Through years, through men, through nature fleet, 
Through love and thought, through power and dream. 

* For the development of the artistic form of this musical alle- 
gory of the Concord River, and the flood of life and thought and 
love in which the soul finds itself when its eyes are opened, see 
Appendix, p. 87. Compare with the Sphinx, Ode to W. H. C, 
Alphonso of Castile, etc., in melody, finish, form. 



SEA-SHORE. 39 

taquit, a goblin strong, 
rd and flint makes jewels gay ; 
ose their grief who hear his song, is 

And where he winds is the day of day. 

So forth and brighter fares my stream, — 
Who drink it shall not thirst again ; 
No darkness stains its equal gleam, 
And ages drop in it like rain. 



20 



SEA-SHORE.* 

I heard or seemed to hear the chiding Sea 
Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come ? 
Am I not always here, thy summer home ? 
Is not my voice thy music, morn and eve ? 
My breath thy healthful climate in the heats, 5 
My touch thy antidote, my bay thy bath ? 
Was ever building like my terraces ? 
Was ever couch magnificent as mine ? 
Lie on the warm rock-ledges, and there learn 
A little hut suffices like a town. 10 

I make your sculptured architecture vain, 
Vain beside mine. I drive my wedges home, 
And carve the coastwise mountain into caves, 
Lo ! here is Rome and Nineveh and Thebes, 
Karnak and Pyramid and Giant's Stairs 15 

Half piled or prostrate ; and my newest slab 
Older than all thy race. 

18. Cf. John iv, 13, 14, — a passage which was obviously in 
the poet's mind when he wrote this verse. 

* Compare the original prose form of this poem from Emer- 
son's Journal, Appendix, p. 87. What is the metre ? 



40 NATURE. 

Behold the Sea, 
The opaline, the plentiful and strong, 
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June, 
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July ; 20 

Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds, 
Purger of earth, and medicine of men ; 
Creating a sweet climate by my breath, 
Washing out harms and griefs from memory, 
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow, 25 

Giving a hint of that which changes not. 
Eich are the sea-gods : — who gives gifts but they ? 
They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls : 
They pluck Force thence, and give it to the wise. 
For every wave is wealth to Daedalus, so 

Wealth to the cunning artist who can work 
This matchless strength. Where shall he find, O 



waves : 



A load your Atlas shoulders cannot lift 



18. plentiful. " I like the sentiment of the poor woman who, 
coming from a wretched garret in an inland manufacturing town 
for the first time to the sea-shore, gazing at the ocean, said she 
was ' glad for once in her life to see something which there was 
enough of.' " viii, 134. 

22. Cf . " To those who gaze from the sea's edge 
It is there for benefit ; 
It is there for purging light; 
There for purifying storms; 
And its depths reflect all forms : 
It cannot parley with the mean, — 
Pure by impure is not seen. 
For there 's no sequestered grot, 
Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot, 
But Justice, journeying in the sphere 
Daily stoops to harbor there." 

Astrea, ix, 76. 
30. See May-Day, 204, note, p. 28. 



SEA-SHORE. 41 

I, with my hammer pounding evermore 
The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust, 35 

Strewing my bed, and, in another age, 
Rebuild a continent of better men. 
Then I unbar the doors : my paths lead out 
The exodus of nations : I disperse 
Men to all shores that front the hoary main. 40 

I too have arts and, sorceries ; 
Illusion dwells forever with the wave. 
I know what spells are laid. Leave me to deal 
With credulous and imaginative man ; 
For, though he scoop my water in his palm, 45 

A few rods off he deems it gems and clouds. 
Planting strange fruits and sunshine on the shore, 
I make some coast alluring, some lone isle, 
To distant men, who must go there, or die. 

45. Cf. Each and All, 19 ff., p. 61. " You walk on the beach 
and enjoy the animation of the picture. Scoop up a little water 
in the hollow of your palm, take up a handful of shore sand : 
well, these are the elements. What is beach but acres of sand ? 
What is ocean but cubic miles of water ? A little more or less 
signifies nothing. No: it is that this brute matter is part of 
somewhat not brute. It is that the sand floor is held by spheral 
gravity, and bent to be a part of the round globe, under the 
optical sky, — part of the astonishing astronomy, and existing at 
last to moral ends and from moral causes." Success, vii, 282. 
" The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character 
until seen with the shore or the* ship. Who would value any 
number of miles of Atlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude 
and longitude ? Confine it by granite rocks, let it wash a shore 
where wise men dwell, and it is filled with expression, and the 
point of greatest interest is where the land and w r ater meet.'' 
Method of Nature, i, 195, 196. 

48. The fatal drawing of men by the sea is embodied in all 
the old stories of sirens, mermaids, loreleis, etc. ; but Emerson 
may have had in mind Ulysses' story of his last western voyage 
(Dante, Inferno, xxvi), which Tennyson retold in his Ulysses. 



42 NATURE. 



WALDEINSAMKEIT.* 

I do not count the hours I spend 
In wandering by the sea ; 
The forest is my loyal friend, 
Like God it useth me. 

In plains that room for shadows make 5 

Of skirting hills to lie, 
Bound in by streams which give and take 
Their colors from the sky ; 

Or on the mountain-crest sublime, 

Or down the oaken glade, 10 

O what have I to do with time ? 

For this the day was made. 

Cities of mortals woe-begone 

Fantastic care derides, 

But in the serious landscape lone 15 

Stern benefit abides. 

Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy, 

And merry is only a mask of sad, 

But, sober on a fund of joy, 

The woods at heart are glad. 20 

* On being alone in the woods. Compare Wordsworth's Ex- 
postulation and Reply and The Tables Turned, Riv. Lit. No. 76, 
pp. 49, 50. 



20. Cf. 



1 And 't is my faith that every flower 
Enjoys the air it breathes. 

The budding twigs spread out their fan 

To catch the breezy air, 
And I must think, do all I can, 

That there was pleasure there. ' ' 

Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring. 



WALDEINSAMKEIT. 43 

There the great Planter plants 
Of fruitful worlds the grain, 
And with a million spells enchants 
The souls that walk in pain. 

Still on the seeds of all he made 25 

The rose of beauty burns ; 
Through times that wear and forms that fade, 
Immortal youth returns. 

The black ducks mounting from the lake, 
The pigeon in the pines, 30 

The bittern's boom, a desert make 
Which 110 false art refines. 

Down in yon watery nook, 

Where bearded mists divide, 

The gray old gods whom Chaos knew, 35 

The sires of Nature, hide. 

Aloft, in secret veins of air, 

Blows the sweet breath of song, 

O, few to scale those uplands dare, 

Though they to all belong ! 40 

See thou bring not to field or stone 
The fancies found in books ; 
Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own, 
To brave the landscape's looks. 

41. See Emerson's Journal at the time of his settling in Con- 
cord and first owning woods of his own, E. W. E., 60 ff. 

" To read the sense the woods impart 
You must bring the throbbing heart." 

Tlie Miracle, ix, 306. 



44 NATURE. 



Oblivion here thy wisdom is, 45 

Thy thrift, the sleep of cares ; 
For a proud idleness like this 
Crowns all thy mean affairs. 



THE APOLOGY.* 

Think me not unkind and rude 

That I walk alone in grove and glen ; 

I go to the god of the wood 
To fetch his word to men. 

Tax not my sloth that I 5 

Fold my arms beside the brook ; 

Each cloud that floated in the sky 
Writes a letter in my book. 

Chide me not, laborious band, 

For the idle flowers I brought ; 10 

Every aster in my hand 

Goes home loaded with a thought. 

There was never mystery 

But 't is figured in the flowers ; 

* Cf. Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply, Riv. Lit. No. 76, 
p. 49. 

2. " When Nero advertised for a new luxury, a walk in the 
woods should have been offered. 'T is the consolation of mortal 
men. I think no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it. 
'T is one of the secrets for dodging old age, for Nature makes 
a like impression on age as on youth. It is the best of humanity, 
I think, that goes out to walk." Country Life (1857), Cabot, 
762. " Wherever I go, therefore," he wrote to Miss Jackson 
just before his marriage to her, " I guard and study my ram- 



WOODNOTES. 45 

Was never secret history is 

But birds tell it in the bovvers. 

One harvest from thy field 

Homeward brought the oxen strong ; 
A second crop thine acres yield, 

Which I gather in a song. 20 



WOODNOTES. 
I. 

1. 

When the pine tosses its cones 

To the song of its waterfall tones, 

Who speeds to the woodland walks ? 

To birds and trees who talks ? 

Caesar of his leafy Rome, 5 

There the poet is at home. 

He goes to the river-side, — 

Not hook nor line hath he ; 

He stands in the meadows wide, — 

Nor gun nor scythe to see. 10 

Sure some god his eye enchants : 

What he knows nobody wants. 

In the wood he travels glad, 

bling propensities with a care that is ridiculous to people, but to 
me is the care of my high calling." E. W. E., 62 ; Cabot, 236. 
Cf. Waldeinaamkeit, and numerous prose allusions to his "wan- 
dering propensity," especially his journal at the time of set- 
tling in Concord. E. W. E., 58-65. 

15. Cf. May-Day, 68, note, p. 25. 

19. Cf. Shakspeare, iv, 206, quoted in the Introduction, p. xii. 

8, 10. Cf. note to line 47. See, also, Forbearance, p. 71. 



46 NATURE, 

Without better fortune had, 

Melancholy without bad. is 

Knowledge this man prizes best 

Seems fantastic to the rest : 

Pondering shadows, colors, clouds, 

Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds, 

Boughs on which the wild bees settle, 20 

Tints that spot the violet's petal, 

Why Nature loves the number five, 

And why the star-form she repeats : 

Lover of all things alive, 

Wonderer at all he meets, 25 

Wonderer chiefly at himself, — 

Who can tell him what he is ? 

Or how meet in human elf 

Coming and past eternities ? 30 



And such I knew, a forest seer, 
A minstrel of the natural year, 

25. " The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually 
wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal 
Societies, and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's 
Philosophy, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories 
with their results, in his single head, — is but a Pair of Specta- 
cles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look 
through him, then he may be useful." Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 
chap. x. So Emerson in a lecture on Moral Sense, in Boston, 
March 18, 1860, quoted by Cabot, 770 : " I take it to be a main 
end of education to touch the springs of wonder in us," etc. 

28. See The Sphinx, ix, i. Cf. i, 120; i, 9, 10; xii, 15; and often. 

31. In 1852, Emerson, inviting a friend to Concord, wrote: 
" If old Pan were here, you would come ; and we have young 
Pan under another name, whom you shall see, and hear his reeds, 
if you tarry not." E. W. E., 112. Earlier, in the Journal for 
June G, 1841 : "The good river-god has taken the form of my 



WOODNOTES. 47 

Foreteller of the vernal ides, 

Wise harbinger of spheres and tides, 

A lover trne, who knew by heart 35 

Each joy the mountain dales impart ; 

It seemed that Nature could not raise 

A plant in any secret place, 

In quaking bog, on snowy hill, 

valiant Henry Thoreau here, and introduced me to the riches of 
his shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream, — a lovely new world lying 
as close and yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one of streets 
and shops as death to life, or poetry to prose." Read Emerson's 
Biographical Sketch of Thoreau, x, 419, to which vv. 47 to 50 are 
prefixed as motto. Cf. May-Day, p. 30. Thoreau's Early Spring 
in Massachusetts, and the other volumes of selections from his 
Journal, would seem to give most interesting confirmation of 
this poetic judgment of him as the ideal " forest seer." But some 
of the poem Emerson wrote before he knew Thoreau ; and just 
as in Saadi, the ideal poet, and Osman, the ideal man, he em- 
bodies the essential traits of his own character, so here in the 
" forest seer " he gives an exact account of his own habits and 
experiences, — another illustration of the self-revelation of Emer- 
son's poetry to which Dr. Holmes alludes. Prose illustrations of 
these naturalist traits, therefore, have to be taken from Emerson's 
paper on Thoreau, which may be found also in Riv. Lit. No. 27. 
35. " It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. 
He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it 
as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the 
snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path 
before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the 
reward was great." x, 437. Riv. Lit. No. 27, p. 20. Cf. 

THE WALK. 

A queen rejoices in her peers, 

And wary Nature knows her own 

By court and city, dale and down, 

And like a lover volunteers, 

And to her son will treasures more 

And more to purpose freely pour 

In one wood walk, than learned men 

Can find with glass in ten times ten. ix, 304. 



48 NATURE. 

Beneath the grass that shades the rill, 40 

Under the snow, between the rocks, 

In damp fields known to bird and fox, 

But he would come in the very hour 

It opened in its virgin bower, 

As if a sunbeam showed the place, 45 

And tell its long-descended race. 

It seemed as if the breezes brought him ; 

It seemed as if the sparrows taught him ; 

As if by secret sight he knew 

Where, in far fields, the orchis grew. 50 

Many haps fall in the field 

Seldom seen by wishful eyes ; 

But all her shows did Nature yield, 

To please and win this pilgrim wise. 

He saw the partridge drum in the woods ; 55 

He heard the woodcock's evening hymn ; 

He found the tawny thrushes' broods ; 

And the shy hawk did wait for him ; 

What others did at distance hear, 

And guessed within the thicket's gloom, 60 

Was shown to this philosopher, 

And at his bidding seemed to come. 

3. 
In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberer's gang 
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang ; 

47. See Appendix, p. 88 ; Riv. Lit. No. 27, p. 22. 

51. See Appendix, p. 88 ; Riv. Lit. No. 27, p. 16. 

55. See Appendix, p. 89 ; Riv. Lit. No. 27, p. 22. 

63. " His visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the Indian. 
Occasionally a small party of Penobscot Indians would visit Con- 
cord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river 
bank. He failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them; 
though he well knew that asking questions of Indians is like cate- 
chizing beavers and rabbits." x, 441. Riv. Lit. No. 27, p. 23. 



WOODNOTES. 49 

He trode the implanted forest floor, whereon 65 

The all-seeing snn for ages hath not shone ; 
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, 
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. 
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, 
The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads, 70 

And blessed the monument of the man of flowers, 
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern 

bowers. 
He heard, when in the grove, at intervals, 
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls, — 
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree, 75 

Declares the close of its green century. 
Low lies the plant to whose creation went 
Sweet influence from every element ; 
Whose living towers the years conspired to build, 
Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild. so 

Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed, 
He roamed, content alike with man and beast. 
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night ; 
There the red morning touched him with its light. 
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made, 85 
So long he roved at will the boundless shade. 
The timid it concerns to ask their way, 
And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray, 
To make no step until the event is known, 
And ills to come as evils past bemoan. 90 

68. What do you think of the poetry of this verse ? 
71. Who was " the man of flowers " ? What was his monu- 
ment ? 

90. Cf. BORROWING. 

FROM THE FRENCH. 

Some of your hurts you have cured, 

And the sharpest you still have survived, 

But what torments of grief you endured 

From evils which never arrived ! ix, 241; vi, 252. 



50 NA TURE. 

Not so the wise ; no coward watch he keeps 

To spy what danger on his pathway creeps ; 

Go where he will, the wise man is at home, 

His hearth the earth, — his hall the azure dome ; 

Where his clear spirit leads him, there 's his road, 95 

By God's own light illumined and foreshowed. 

4. 

'T was one of the charmed days 

When the genius of God doth flow, 

The wind may alter twenty ways, 

A tempest cannot blow ; 100 

It may blow north, it still is warm ; 

Or south, it still is clear ; 

Or east, it smells like a clover-farm ; 

Or west, no thunder fear. 

The musing peasant lowly great ' 105 

Beside the forest water sate ; 

The rope-like pine roots crosswise grown 

Composed the network of his throne ; 

The wide lake, edged with sand and grass, 

Was burnished to a floor of glass, 110 

Painted with shadows green and proud 

Of the tree and of the cloud. 

He was the heart of all the scene ; 

On him the sun looked more serene ; 

93. Cf. the concluding lines of Destiny, an epitome of Emer- 
son's whole philosophy : — 

" Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, 
Carries the eagles, and masters the sword." ix, 33. 

" The soul is no traveller ; the wise man stays at home." ii, 
79, and often. Cf. Written at Rome, 1833, ix, 301. 
94. Cf. "That each should in his house abide, 

Therefore was the world so wide." ix, 298. 



WOODNOTES. 51 

To hill and cloud his face was known, — 115 
It seemed the likeness of their own ; 
They knew by secret sympathy 
The public child of earth and sky. 
" You ask," he said, " what guide 
Me through trackless thickets led, 120 

Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and 

wide. 
I found the water's bed. 
The watercourses were my guide ; 
I travelled grateful by their side, 
Or through their channel dry ; 125 

They led me through the thicket damp, 
Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp, 
Through beds of granite cut my road, 
And their resistless friendship showed : 
The falling waters led me, 130 

The foodful waters fed me, 
And brought me to the lowest land, 
Unerring to the ocean sand. 
The moss upon the forest bark 
Was pole-star when the night was dark ; 135 
The purple berries in the wood 
Supplied me necessary food ; 
For Nature ever faithful is 
To such as trust her faithfulness. 
When the forest shall mislead me, 140 

When the nijylit and morning lie, 
When sea and land refuse to feed me, 
'T will be time enough to die ; 

134, 135. How did the moss serve as compass to him ? 
138. Cf. Wordsworth's T intern Abbey : — 

" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her." 



52 NATURE. 

Then will yet my mother yield 

A pillow in her greenest field, 145 

Nor the Jnne flowers scorn to cover 

The clay of their departed lover." 



THE SONG OF THE PINE-TREE.* 

WOODNOTES, II. 

" Heed the old oracles, 
Ponder my spells ; 
Song wakes in my pinnacles 
When the wind swells. 

Soundeth the prophetic wind, 5 

The shadows shake on the rock behind, 
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings 
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings. 

Hearken ! Hearken ! 
If thou wouldst know the mystic song 10 

Chanted when the sphere was young. 
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells; 
O wise man ! hear'st thou half it tells ? 
O wise man ! hear'st thou the least part ? 
'T is the chronicle of art. 15 

To the open ear it sings 
Sweet the genesis of things, 
Of tendency through endless ages, 

* What observation do you make on the rhythm of this song ? 
What is its chief poetical quality ? Is it dependent upon form ? 
upon diction ? 

16. This passage has been called " the prose doctrine of evo- 
lution turned into poetry." Cf. the motto to Nature, Appendix, 
p'. 89. Read Conway, chapters xv and xvi ; 0. W. II, 105. 
" Whatever I have done the world owes to Emerson." Tyndall. 



THE SONG OF THE PINE-TREE. 53 

Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages, 

Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 20 

Of the old flood's subsiding slime, 

Of chemic matter, force and form, 

Of poles and powers, cold, wet and warm : 

The rushing metamorphosis 

Dissolving all that fixture is, 25 

Melts things that be to things that seem, 

And solid nature to a dream. 

O, listen to the undersong, 

The ever old, the ever young ; 

And, far within those cadent pauses, 30 

The chorus of the ancient Causes ! 

Delights the dreadful Destiny 

To fling his voice into the tree, 

And shock thy weak ear with a note 

Breathed from the everlasting throat. 35 

In music he repeats the pang 

Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang. 

O mortal ! thy ears are stones ; 

These echoes are laden with tones 

Which only the pure can hear ; 40 

Thou canst not catch what they recite 

Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right, 

29. Cf. " I hear the lofty pagans 

Of the masters of the shell, 

Who heard the starry music 

And recount the numbers well ; 

Olympian bards who sung 

Divine Ideas below, 

Which always find us young 

And always keep us so." ix, 82. 

" Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such 
a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty." ii, 25G. 
38. Cf. Blight, ix, 123; My Garden, 45, note, p. 37. 



54 NATURE. 

Of man to come, of human life, 

Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife." 



THE WORLD-SOUL. 

Thanks to the morning light, 

Thanks to the foaming sea, 
To the uplands of New Hampshire, 

To the green-haired forest free ; 
Thanks to each man of courage, 5 

To the maids of holy mind, 
To the boy with his games undaunted 

Who never looks behind. 

Cities of proud hotels, 

Houses of rich and great, 10 

Vice nestles in your chambers, 

Beneath your roofs of slate. 
It cannot conquer folly, — 

Time-and-space-conquering steam, — 
And the light-outspeeding telegraph i r > 

Bears nothing on its beam. 

11. Cf. " Who liveth by the ragged pine 
Found eth a heroic line ; 
Who liveth in the palace hall 
Waneth fast and spendeth all." ix, 48. 

16 If. "Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. . . . One 
might say that the inventions of the last fifty years counterpoise 
those of fifty centuries before them : steam, the enemy of space 
and time ; the ocean telegraph, that extension of the eye and 
ear, — how excellent are the mechanical aids we have applied to 
the human body ! . . . Many facts concur to show that we must 
look deeper for our salvation than to steam, photographs, bal- 
loons, or astronomy ! . . . Machinery is aggressive. The weaver 



THE WORLD-SOUL. 55 

The politics are base ; 

The letters do not cheer : 
And 't is far in the deeps of history, 

The voice that speaketh clear. 20 

Trade and the streets ensnare us, 

Our bodies are weak and worn ; 
We plot and corrupt each other, 

And we despoil the unborn. 

Yet there in the parlor sits 25 

Some figure of noble guise, — 
Our angel, in a stranger's form, 

Or woman's pleading eyes ; 
Or only a flashing sunbeam 

In at the window-pane ; 30 

Or Music pours on mortals 

Its beautiful disdain. 

The inevitable morning 

Finds them who in cellars be ; 

becomes a web, the machinist a machine. . . . What sickening 
details in the daily journals ! Politics were never more corrupt 
and brutal ; and Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean, 
that educator of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends 
in shameful defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy, all over the 
world. Of course we resort to the enumeration of his arts and 
inventions as a measure of the worth of man. But if, with all 
his arts, he is a felon, we cannot assume the mechanical skill or 
chemical resources as the measure of worth. What have these 
arts done for the character, for the worth of mankind ? Are 
men better ? . . . 'T is too plain that with the material power 
the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have 
not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered 
us, and we took works." vii, 150-160. This was made public 
in January, 1857 : what of the progress since that day — since 
the opening of the Suez Canal in 18G9 ? Cf. v, 161 ff. 
25. See the beginning of the Essay on Friendship, ii, 183. 



56 NATURE. 

And be sure the all-loving Nature 35 

Will smile in a factory. 
Yon ridge of purple landscape, 

Yon sky between the walls, 
Hold all the hidden wonders 

In scanty intervals. 40 

Alas ! the Sprite that haunts us 

Deceives our rash desire ; 
It whispers of the glorious gods, 

And leaves us in the mire. 
We cannot learn the cipher 45 

That 's writ upon our cell ; 
Stars taunt us by a mystery 

Which we could never spell. 

If but one hero knew it, 

The world would blush in flame ; 50 

The sage, till he hit the secret, 

Would hang his head for shame. 

45 ff. Cf. the longer poem on Monadnoc, 262 &., 284 ff., ix, 
66, and the Song of Nature, awaiting the " man-child glorious, 
the summit of the whole." 

" I travail in pain for him, 
My creatures travail and wait ; 
His couriers come by squadrons. 
He comes not to the gate. 

" I moulded kings and saviors, 
And bards o'er kings to rule ; — 
But fell the starry influence short, 
The cup was never full." ix, 211. Cf. i, 194. 

Cf. also, " But never yet the man was found 

Who could the mystery expound." ix, 280. 

And " Thorough a thousand voices 
Spoke the universal dame ; 
' Who telleth one of my meanings, 
Is master of all I am.' " The Sphinx, ix, 13. 



THE WORLD-SOUL. 57 

Our brothers have not read it, 

Not one has found the key ; 
And henceforth we are comforted, — 55 

We are but such as they. 

Still, still the secret presses ; 

The nearing clouds draw down ; 
The crimson morning flames into 

The fopperies of the town. 00 

Within, without the idle earth, 

Stars weave eternal rings ; 
The sun himself shines heartily, 

And shares the joy he brings. 

And what if Trade sow cities 65 

Like shells along the shore, 
And thatch with towns the prairie broad 

With railways ironed o'er ? — 
They are but sailing foam-bells 

Along Thought's causing stream, 70 

And take their shape and sun-color 

From him that sends the dream. 

For Destiny never swerves, 

Nor yields to men the helm ; 
He shoots his thought, by hidden nerves, 75 

Throughout the solid realm. 
The patient Dasmon sits, 

With roses and a shroud ; 

77. " Over everything stands its dseuion or soul." The Poet, 
iii, 29. "The fairest fortune that can befall a man is to be 
guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own." Plato, iv, 
63; xii, 38. Cf. Daemonic Love, ix, 98 ; vi, 273; i, 199; ii, 132; 
vi, 48; x, 98. 



58 NATURE. 

He has his way, and deals his gifts, — 
But ours is not allowed. so 

He is no churl nor trifler, 

And his viceroy is none, — 
Love-without-weakness, — 

Of Genius sire and son. 
And his will is not thwarted ; 85 

The seeds of land and sea 
Are the atoms of his body bright, 

And his behest obey. 

He serveth the servant, 

The brave he loves amain ; 90 

He kills the cripple and the sick, 

And straight begins again ; 
For gods delight in gods, 

And thrust the weak aside ; 
To him who scorns their charities 95 

Their arms fly open wide. 

When the old world is sterile 

And the ages are effete, 
He will from wrecks and sediment 

The fairer world complete. 100 

He forbids to despair ; 

His cheeks mantle with mirth ; 

81. Cf. Give all to Love, ix, 84. 

95. This thought is beautifully elaborated in the difficult poem, 
To Rhea, ix, 18. Cf. Appendix, p. 93; Brahma, 12, ix, 171. 

" Leave all thy pedant lore apart ; 
God hid the whole world in thy heart. 
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns, 
Gives all to them who all renounce." ix, 55. 

101. Cf. the Essay on Worship, vi, 199 &. "All my opinions, 



MONADNOC FROM AFAR. 59 

And the unimagined good of men 
Is yearning at the birth. 

Spring still makes spring in the mind 105 

When sixty years are told ; 
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, 

And we are never old. 
Over the winter glaciers 

I see the summer glow, no 

And through the wild-piled snowdrift, 

The warm rosebuds below. 

MONADNOC FROM AFAR.* 

Dark flower of Cheshire garden, 

Red evening duly dyes 
Thy sombre head with rosy hues 

To fix far-gazing eyes. 
Well the Planter knew how strongly 

Works thy form on human thought ; 
I muse what secret purpose had he 

To draw all fancies to this spot. 

affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief, — incline to that 
side. But I cannot give reasons to a person of different persua- 
sion that are at all adequate to the force of ray conviction. Yet 
when I fail to find the reason, ray faith is not less." Cabot, 204. 

* Monadnoc, a solitary, sharp-peaked, typical mountain, in Che- 
shire County, N. H., was a favorite resort of Emerson, Thoreau, 
and Whittier, and is visited with additional interest on their 
account. This little poem Emerson did not publish ; partly, 
perhaps, because in the more philosophical Monadnoc (omitted 
regretfully from this selection on account of its length) he had 
told how strongly its form works on human thought. See an 
interesting paper on " The Grand Monadnock," fully illustrated, 
by Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, in the New England Magazine, 
September, 1896. 



III. LIFE AND CHARACTER. 



EACH AND ALL. 

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown 

Of thee from the hill-top looking down ; 

The heifer that lows in the upland farm, 

Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm ; 

The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, 5 

Deems not that great Napoleon 

Stops his horse, and lists with delight, 

Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height ; 

Nor knowest thou what argument 

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. 10 

All are needed by each one ; 

Nothing is fair or good alone. 

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, 
Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; 
I brought him home, in his nest, at even ; 15 

He sings the song, but it cheers not now, 

9. argument : justification, inspiration, encouragement, aid. 

" Son of man," saith stern experience, " all giving and receiv- 
ing is reciprocal: you entertain angels unawares, but they cannot 
impart more or higher things than you are in a state to receive. 
But every step of your progress affects the intercourse you hold 
with all others, elevates its tone, deepens its meaning, sanctifies 
its spirit ; and, when time and suffering and self-denial shall 
have transfigured this spotted self, you shall find your fellows 
also transformed, and their faces shall shine upon you with the 
light of wisdom and the beauty of holiness." Rome, April 18, 
1833, letter to his aunt Mary. Cabot, 187. See Poet-Lore, May, 
1894, p. 273. 



EACH AND ALL. 61 

For I did not bring home the river and sky ; — 

He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye. 

The delicate shells lay on the shore ; 

The bubbles of the latest wave 20 

Fresh pearls to their enamel gave, 

And the bellowing of the savage sea 

Greeted their safe escape to me. 

I wiped away the weeds and foam, 

I fetched my sea-born treasures home ; 25 

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things 

Had left their beauty on the shore 

With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. 

The lover watched his graceful maid, 

As 'mid the virgin train she strayed, 30 

Nor knew her beauty's best attire 

Was woven still by the snow-white choir. 

At last she came to his hermitage, 

Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage ; — 

The gay enchantment was undone, 35 

A gentle wife, but fairy none. 

Then I said, " I covet truth ; 
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat ; 

18. Cf. " The brook sings on, but sings in vain, 

Wanting the echo in my brain." ix, 276. 

Cf. Wordsworth's Reverie of Poor Susan, Riv. Lit. No. 76, p. 25. 
32. Why do you suppose her companions are called a choir f 
What was the chorus in the Greek drama ? 

37, 38. But they cannot be separated, for truth is beauty, as 
Keats finely said : — 

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

And Emerson, like the fine and beautiful souls of all time, ac- 
knowledges the identity not only of beauty and truth (cf. i, 59 ; 
xii, 117) and goodness (verse 12 above; cf. iv, 57; xii, 116, 132, 
140), but also of goodness and truth (i, 210; iv, 126), love and 



62 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

I leave it behind with the games of youth : 

As I spoke, beneath my feet 

The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, 

Running over the club-moss burrs ; 

I inhaled the violet's breath ; 

Around me stood the oaks and firs ; 

Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground ; 

Over me soared the eternal sky, 

Full of light and of deity ; 

Again I saw, again I heard, 

The rolling river, the morning bird ; — 

Beauty through my senses stole ; 

I yielded myself to the perfect whole. 



THE RHODORA:* 

ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER ? 

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, 
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, 
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, 
To please the desert and the sluggish brook. 
The purple petals, fallen in the pool, 5 

Made the black water with their beauty gay ; 

truth {Celestial Love, ix, 105), love and beauty {Beauty, ix, 233), 
beauty and wisdom {Berrying, ix, 41). ." The Italians defined 
beauty ' il piu neW unb ' (' the many in one,' intimating that what 
is truly beautiful seems related to all nature, xii, 118). Nothing 
is quite beautiful alone ; nothing but is beautiful in the whole. 
Truth, and goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the 
same All." i, 29, 30. See Appendix, p. 89. 

* In sending this poem to his friend, James Freeman Clarke 
(for publication), Emerson wrote February 27, 1839 : " You are 
quite welcome to the lines ' To the Rhodora,' but I think they 
need the superscription." Why ? 



THE PROBLEM. G3 

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, 
And court the flower that cheapens his array. 

Rhodora ! if the sages ask thee why 
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, 10 

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, 
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being : 
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose ! 
I never thought to ask, I never knew : 
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose 15 

The self-same Power that brought me there brought 
you. 

THE PROBLEM. 

I like a church ; I like a cowl, 
I love a prophet of the soul ; 

12. "The ancient Greeks called the world cosmos, beauty. 
Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power 
of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the moun- 
tain, the tree, the animal, give us delight in and for themselves." 
Nature, i. 21. Read the whole of this chapter iii, on Beauty. 

" Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim 
of the human being. It does not lie within the limits of the 
understanding. . . . Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. 
But it cannot be defined." Michael Angelo, xii, 117. 

" A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we 
can see the end of." The Poet, iii, 21. 

2. Remember that the rhyme Emerson aimed at was "not 
tinkling rhyme." ... "I wish to write such rhymes as shall 
not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom." 
See Introduction, p. xv. Do you not suspect a purpose here to 
bring out even more forcibly the rhyme or balance of the 
thought ? (Cf. viii, 51, 54, 65.) What is the contrast ? Is it a 
contrast inherent in the nature of the priest and the prophet, 
or due only to the human imperfections of the priest? "A 



64 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

And on my heart monastic aisles 

Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles : 

Yet not for all his faith can see 5 

Would I that cowled churchman be. 

Why should the vest on him allure, 
Which I could not on me endure ? 

Not from a vain or shallow thought 
His awful Jove young Phidias brought ; 10 

Never from lips of cunning fell 
. The thrilling Delphic oracle ; 
Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; 

certain wonderful friend of mine said that ' a false priest was 
the falsest of false things.' But what makes a priest ? A 
cassock ? O Diogenes ! or the power (and thence the call) to 
teach men's duties as they flow from the Superhuman ? " Em- 
erson to Carlyle, November 30, 1834. Read from the Italian 
Journal, Cabot, 188. Cf. Ruskin on Lycidas in Sesame and Lilies. 

7, 8. " I dare not speak lightly of usages I omit. And so, 
with this hollow obeisance to things I do not myself value, I go 
on, not pestering others with what I do not believe : . . . but 
this is my charge, plain and clear, to act faithfully upon my own 
faith ; to live by it myself, and see what a hearty obedience to it 
will do." Journal, September 8, 1833, Cabot, 201. What, then, 
is the Problem ? The subject of the poem is veracity, sincerity, 
— the self-surrender of self-reliance to the universal mind. 

9-18. " Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension 
never feigned an act of real goodness. Pretension never wrote 
an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, 
nor abolished slavery." ii, 150. See 32, note. 

" Nor kind nor coinage buys 
Aught above its rate. 
Fear, Craft, and Avarice 
Cannot rear a State." ix, 230. 

Read the Essay on Art in Society and Solitude, vii, 41 ff. 



THE PROBLEM. 65 

The litanies of nations came, 15 

Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 

Up from the burning core below, — 

The canticles of love and woe : 

The hand that rounded Peter's dome 

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome 20 

Wrought in a sad sincerity ; 

Himself from God he could not free ; 

He builded better than he knew ; — 

The conscious stone to beauty grew. 

Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest 25 

Of leaves, and feathers from her breast? 

Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, 

Painting with morn each annual cell ? 

Or how the sacred pine-tree adds 

To her old leaves new myriads ? 30 

Such and so grew these holy piles, 

Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. 

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, 

As the best gem upon her zone, 

And Morning opes with haste her lids 35 

To gaze upon the Pyramids ; 

O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, 

As on its friends, with kindred eye ; 

19-22. See Appendix, p. 90. Cf. ii, 328; vii, 51, 56, 58, etc. 

23. The most frequently quoted line of Emerson. Cf. " Our 
arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose 
melody is sweeter than he knows." vii, 50. " The great man 
knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that 
fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must ; it was 
the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circum- 
stances of the moment." ii, 147. Cf. ii, 263, and Appendix, p. 91. 

32. " The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and 
the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. 
Love and fear laid every stone." vii, 58. See 45, and note. 



GQ LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

For out of Thought's interior sphere 
These wonders rose to upper air ; 40 

And Nature gladly gave them place, 
Adopted them into her race, 
And granted them an equal date 
.With Andes and with Ararat. 

These temples grew as grows the grass ; 45 

Art might obey, but not surpass. 

The passive Master lent his hand 

To the vast soul that o'er him planned ; 

And the same power that reared the shrine 

Bestrode the tribes that knelt within. 50 

Ever the fiery Pentecost 

Girds with one flame the countless host, 

Trances the heart through chanting choirs, 

And through the priest the mind inspires. 

The word unto the prophet spoken 55 

Was writ on tables yet unbroken ; 

39. See Appendix, p. 91. 

45. " And so every genuine work of art has as much reason 
for being as the earth and the sun. The gayest charm of beauty 
has a root in the constitution of things. The Iliad of Homer, 
the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of Ms- 
chylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the plays of 
Shakspeare, all and each were made, not for sport, but in 
grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men." 
vii, 56. 

47, 48. These two verses were chosen to be engraved, with a 
border of pine needles and cones, on the bronze plate on Emer- 
son's gravestone, as giving in a few words his fundamental belief 
that man is inspired, if he lets himself be, by the Over-Soul of 
which he is a part. See Appendix, p. 92 ; Introduction, p. xviii. 

51. On the day of Pentecost, " cloven tongues like as of fire " 
appeared to the apostles, "and they were all filled with the 
Holy Ghost." Acts ii. Cf. i, 200; ii, 105; xii, 58; ii, 259. 



THE ROMANY GIRL. G7 

The word by seers or sibyls told, 

In groves of oak, or fanes of gold, 

Still floats upon the morning wind, 

Still whispers to the willing mind. 60 

One accent of the Holy Ghost 

The heedless world hath never lost. 

I know what say the fathers wise, — 

The Book itself before me lies, 

Old Chrysostom, best Augustine, 65 

And he who blent both in his line, 

The younger Golden Lij)S or mines, 

Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines, 

His words are music in my ear, 

I see his cowled portrait dear ; 70 

And yet, for all his faith could see, 

I would not the good bishop be. 

THE ROMANY GIRL.* 

The sun goes down, and with him takes 
The coarseness of my poor attire ; 
The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame 
Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher. 

GO. " With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires ; 
nor can the Bible be closed until the last great man is born." 
iv, 25. Cf. vii, 209; i, 142 : " It is the office of a true teacher 
to show that God is, not was ; that he speaketh, not spake." 

62. " Never was a sincere word utterly lost." ii, 150. 

65. Chrysostom is the Greek for Golden Lips. See Books, 
vii, 198 ; Prayers, xii, 218 ; xi, 388. 

68. Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Connor, 1613-1667, 
author of Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651). 

69-72. What, then, is the Problem ? See 7, 8, and note. 

* Romany. See Borrow's prefaces to Lavengro and Romany 
Rye. 



68 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

Pale Northern girls ! you scorn our race ; 5 

You captives of your air-tight halls, 
Wear out in-doors your sickly days, 
But leave us the horizon walls. 

And if I take you, dames, to task, 

And say it frankly without guile, 10 

Then you are Gypsies in a mask, 

And I the lady all the while. 

If on the heath, below the moon, 

I court and play with paler blood, 

Me false to mine dare whisper none, — is 

One sallow horseman knows me good. 

Go, keep your cheek's rose from the rain, 

For teeth and hair with shopmen deal ; 

My swarthy tint is in the grain, 

The rocks and forest know it real. 20 

The wild air bloweth in our lungs, 
The keen stars twinkle in our eyes, 
The birds gave us our wily tongues, 
The panther in our dances flies. 

You doubt we read the stars on high, 25 

Nathless we read your fortunes true ; 
The stars may hide in the upper sky, 
But without glass we fathom you. 

16. Sallow : sickly ? Pale-face (not a gypsy) ? or yellow, 
like the gypsy in Borrow'sZayem^o, chap, v ? horseman : rider, 
knight, or trader ? 

24. Meaning ? Expand the metaphor into a simile. 

25. An allusion to what characteristic occupation of Gypsies ? 



DAYS. 69 



DAYS.* 

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 

And marching single in an endless file, 

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 

To each they offer gifts after his will, 5 

Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 

4 

* Emerson always looked upon this as his best poem. What 
elements of a sonnet has it ? Why is n't it a sonnet ? Read 
the entry about its production in Emerson's Journal. E. W. E., 
236. 

7. Pleached : effect of this Elizabethan word ? See Much 
Ado About Nothing, I, ii, 10 ; III, i, 7. — pomp : procession, or 
rich display ? Look up the derivation of both words. 

" Silent, passive, even sulkily, Nature offers every morning 
her wealth to man. She is immensely rich : he is welcome to 
her entire goods ; but she speaks no word, will not so much as 
beckon or cough ; only this, she is careful to leave all her doors 
ajar, — towers, hall, stateroom, and cellar. If he takes her 
hint and uses her goods, she speaks no word ; if he slumbers 
and starves, she says nothing." xii, 26. " The Bays are ever 
divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go, like muffled 
and veiled figures sent from a distant, friendly party ; but they 
say nothing, and, if we do not use the gifts they bring, they 
carry them as silently away." vii, 161. Cf. vii, 166, and 
0. W. H., 313. " Write it on your heart that every day is 
the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly 
until he knows that every day is Doomsday. 'T is the old secret 
of the gods that they come in low disguises." vii, 168. 

" This passing moment is an edifice 
Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild." ix, 288. 



70 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 10 

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 



FORERUNNERS.* 

Long I followed happy guides, 

I could never reach their sides ; 

Their step is forth, and, ere the day, 

Breaks up their leaguer, and away. 

Keen my sense, my heart was young, 5 

Right good-will my sinews strung, . 

But no speed of mine avails 

To hunt upon their shining trails. 

On and away, their hasting feet 

Make the morning proud and sweet ; 10 

Flowers they strew, — I catch the scent ; 

Or tone of silver instrument 

Leaves on the wind melodious trace ; 

Yet I could never see their face. 

On eastern hills I see their smokes, 15 

Mixed with mist by distant lochs. 

I met many travellers 

Who the road had surely kept ; 

* " It is a marked distinction of this little poem, one of the 
most exquisite in the language, that it testifies to the possibility 
of finding a certain content in following continually an ideal 
never reached. Most poets elaborate eloquently their discontent 
when they learn that the earth they inhabit is different from the 
heaven they conceive." E. P. Whipple, American Literature, p. 
289. 

17. One day, walking with Emerson, Thoreau heard a note 
which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never 
identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, 



FORERUNNERS. 71 

They saw not my fine revellers, — 

These had crossed them while they slept. 20 

Some had heard their fair report, 

In the country or the court. 

Fleetest couriers alive 

Never yet could once arrive, 

As they went or they returned, 25 

At the house where these sojourned. 

Sometimes their strong speed they slacken, 

Though they are not overtaken ; 

In sleep their jubilant troop is near, — 

I tuneful voices overhear ; 30 

It may be in wood or waste, — 

At unawares 't is come and past. 

Their near camp my spirit knows 

By signs gracious as rainbows. 

I thenceforward and long after, 35 

Listen for their harp-like laughter, 

And carry in my heart, for days, 

Peace that hallows rudest ways. 

when he saw it., was in the act of diving down into a tree or 
bush, and which it was vain to seek. Emerson told him " he 
must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have 
nothing more to show him." He said, " What you seek in vain 
for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at 
dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it 
you become its prey." x, 439. May there not be here a reflec- 
tion of Thoreau's " mythical record of his disappointments," 
which Emerson quotes from Walden, p. 20 ? "I long ago lost 
a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their 
trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, 
describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I 
have met one or two who have heard the hound and the tramp 
of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud ; 
and they have seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had 
lost them themselves." Cf. May-Day, 295 ff., p. 28. 



72 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 



SURSUM CORDA.* 

Seek not the spirit, if it hide 
Inexorable to thy zeal : 
Trembler, do not whine and chide : 
Art thou not also real ? 

Stoop not then to poor excuse ; 5 

Turn on the accuser roundly ; say, 
" Here am I, here will I abide 
Forever to myself soothfast ; 

Go, thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure stay ! " 
Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast, 10 

For only it can absolutely deal. 

* Sursum Corda, " lift up your hearts," is spoken by the high 
priest or celebrant at mass, and the faithful respond : " We lift 
them up unto the Lord," habemus ad Dominum. 

This is the Emersonian chant of self-reliance, — a fundamen- 
tal doctrine forming the subject of many essays {Self -Reliance, 
ii, 45 ; Spiritual Laws, ii, 123 ; Worship, vi, 193, and others) and 
permeating every page of Emerson's writings. Emerson's first 
rule of success is to take Michael Angelo's course, — " to confide 
in one's self, and be something of worth and value." " Each 
man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work. I have to 
say this often, but nature says it oftener." Success, vii, 274. " Is 
not this the theory of every man's genuis or faculty ? Why, 
then, goest thou, as some Boswell or listening worshipper, to this 
saint or that ? Here art thou with whom so long the universe 
travailed in labor: darest thou think meanly of thyself? i, 198, 
199. " If the single man plant himself indomitably on his in- 
stincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." 
i, 114. "There are two mischievous superstitions, I know not 
which does the most harm, one, that ' I am wiser than You,' and 
the other, that ' You are wiser than I.' The truth is that every 
man is furnished, if he will heed it, with wisdom necessary to 
steer his own boat, — if he will not look away from his own to 
see how his neighbor steers his." xii, 27, 49. See Boece, p. 75, 
and cf. i, 79, 140; x, 135, 136 ; Cabot, 320; and Appendix, p. 92. 



TO J. w. 73 



TO J. W.* 



Set not thy foot on graves ; 

Hear what wine and roses say ; 

The mountain chase, the summer waves, 

The crowded town, thy feet may well delay. 

Set not thy foot on graves ; 5 

Nor seek to unwind the shroud 

Which charitable Time 

And Nature have allowed 

To wrap the errors of a sage sublime. 

Set not thy foot on graves ; 10 

Care not to strip the dead 

Of his sad ornament, 

His myrrh, and wine, and rings, 

* To John Weiss, whose paper ou Coleridge, for obvious rea- 
sons, had offended the poet. 

9. "We answer, when they tell us of the bad behavior of 
Luther or Paul : Well, what if they did ? Who was more 
pained than Luther or Paul ? " x, 189. " We have a vicious 
way of esteeming the defects of men organic. We identify the 
man with his faults, judging them from our point of view. We 
should rather ask how they appear from his point of view." Cf. 
Cabot, 390. " We say that every man is entitled to be valued 
by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know 
they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait 
the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful." 
vi, 273. Cf. iv, 87. 

" You shall not love ine for what daily spends ; 
You shall not know me in the noisy street, 
Where I, as others, follow petty ends ; 
Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet ; 
Nor when I 'in jaded, sick, anxious, or mean. 
But love me then and only, when you know 
Me for the channel of the rivers of God 
From deep ideal fontal heavens that flow." ix, 293. 



74 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

His sheet of lead, 

And trophies buried : 

Go, get them where he earned them when alive 

As resolutely dig or dive. 

Life is too short to waste 

In critic peep or cynic bark, 

Quarrel or reprimand : 

'T will soon be dark ; 

Up ! mind thine own aim, and 

God speed the mark ! 



FORBEARANCE. 

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun ? 
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk ? 

16. Cf. " Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, 

And power to him who power exerts." ix, 229. 

18. From the age of thirteen or fourteen Emerson thought 
his children should be encouraged as much as possible to regu- 
late their own conduct. . . . He did not fear to inculcate, even at 
this age, the whole of his own doctrine of self-reliance. To one 
of his daughters, who was away from home at school, he writes : 

" Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for 
wise living, it is a vice to remember. You have done what you 
could : some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in ; forget 
them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day ; you shall 
begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cum- 
bered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and 
fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a 
moment on the rotten yesterdays." Cabot, 489. 

" We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment 
has the supreme claim. The Past is for us, but the sole terms 
on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present." 
viii, 193. 

1. See Woodnotes, 8, 10, and note, p. 45; Appendix, p. 88. 

2. "Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud 



ETIENNE BE LA BOECE. 75 

At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse ? 

Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust ? 

And loved so well a high behavior, 5 

In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained, 

Nobility more nobly to repay ? 

O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine ! 



ETIENNE DE LA BOECE.* 

I serve you not, if you I follow, 
Shadow-like, o'er hill and hollow ; 

with a poet's curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens 
in the aster, nor the feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the 
surprise and affection they awake." Emerson's Preface to W. 
E. Channing's Poems. Cf. ix, 123, 314; vi, 265; vii, 174; iv, 16. 

3. Hast thou declined wine from principle, and chosen plain 
food for health ? " What I must do is all that concerns me, not 
what people think. ... It is easy in the world to live after the 
world's opinion : it is easy in solitude to live after our own : but 
the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with 
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." ii. 55. 

4. Like George Nidiver, Courage, vii, 261. Read the ballad. 
6. " If it were possible to live in right relations with men ! 

Could we not deal with a few persons — with one person — after 
the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their efficacy ? 
Could we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, of silence, 
of forbearing ? " (iii, 110) like the spirits that ministered to 

Saadi: — 

" They spoke not, for their earnest sense 
Outran the craft of eloquence." ix, 259. 

* This name Emerson got from his favorite Montaigne. In 
Representative Men, iv, 155, he tells " how his love began and 
grew for this admirable gossip." From this poem, what should 
you think were the relations between Montaigne and Etienne de 
la Bodce ? See Appendix, p. 93. 

2. " Thank God for these good men, but say ' I also am a man.' 
Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms him- 



76 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

And bend my fancy to your leading, 

All too nimble for my treading. 

When the pilgrimage is done, 5 

And we 've the landscape overrun, 

I am bitter, vacant, thwarted, 

And your heart is unsupported. 

Vainly valiant, you have missed 

The manhood that should yours resist, — 10 

Its complement ; but if I could, 

In severe or cordial mood, 

Lead you rightly to my altar, 

Where the wisest Muses falter, 

And worship that world-warming spark 15 

Which dazzles me in midnight dark, 

Equalizing small and large, 

While the soul it doth surcharge, 

Till the poor is wealthy grown, 

And the hermit never alone, — 20 

The traveller and the road seem one 

With the errand to be done, — 

That were a man's and lover's part, 

That were Freedom's whitest chart. 

self to hopeless mediocrity." i, 143. "We mark with light 
in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary 
years of routine and sin, with souls that made our souls wiser ; 
that spoke what we thought ; that told us what we knew ; that 
gave us leave to be what we inly were." i, 144. Cf. ii, 81, 48. 
" Power fraternizes with power, and wishes you not to be like 
him, but like yourself. Echo the leaders and they will fast 
enough see that you have nothing for them. They come to you 
for something they had not." xii, 27. See Friendship, ii, 186, 
193, 204. " Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than 
his echo." ii. 199. 

" 'T is not within the force of fate 
The fate-conjoined to separate." Threnody, ix, 136. 

21. See iv, 49 ff.; Brahma, ix, 170, E. W. E. } 229; ii, 252. 



FRIENDSHIP. 77 



FRIENDSHIP. 

A RUDDY drop of manly blood 

The surging sea outweighs, 

The world uncertain comes and goes ; 

The lover rooted stays. 

I fancied he was fled, — 5 

And, after many a year, 

Glowed unexhausted kindliness, 

Like daily sunrise there. 

My careful heart was free again, 

O friend, my bosom said, 10 

Through thee alone the sky is arched, 

Through thee the rose is red ; 

All things through thee take nobler form, 

And look beyond the earth, 

The mill-round of our fate appears is 

A sun-path in thy worth. 

Me too. thy nobleness has taught 

To master my despair ; 

The fountains of my hidden life 

Are through thy friendship fair. 20 

5. " The condition which high friendship demands is ability to 
do without it. That high office requires great and sublime 
parts. There must be very two before there can be very one." 
Friendship, ii, 199, 200. Read the whole Essay. 

15. Thy worth dignifies the humdrum of our daily round of 
duties into the revolution of a sun. Compare Hermione, ix, 89, 
and Wordsworth's Lucy poems, Riv. Lit. No. 76, pp. 35-38. 

" There are two elements that go to the composition of friend- 
ship. One is truth (ii, 193). The other is tenderness (ii, 195). 
The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and 
trust. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both." 
ii, 205, 206. 



78 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 



GOOD-BYE.* 

Good-bye, proud world ! I 'm going home : 
Thou art not my friend, and I 'm not thine. 
Long through thy weary crowds I roam ; 
A river-ark on the ocean brine, 

* In sending these verses to his friend, James Freeman Clarke, 
Emerson wrote, February 27, 1839: " They were written sixteen 
years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner 
of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, 
a shade deeper than belongs to me ; and, as it seems nowadays I 
am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they 
must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry 
that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress 
them." Emerson omitted these verses from his Selected Poeins, 
partly perhaps because they were popularly supposed to allude 
to his separation from his Bostou parish (which, however, did 
not take place until 1832), or to some earlier exclusion from 
Boston society. " But there is no other indication of any such 
thing, and the following passage in his Journal, written at this 
time (April, 1824), and containing no doubt the germ of the 
poem, has the word 'apocryphal' written after it: 'There are 
harder crosses to bear than poverty, or sickness, or death. Are 
you armed with the supreme stoicisim of a pure heart and a 
lowly mind ? Can you hear, unconcerned, Pride's supercilious 
taunt and Derision's obstreperous laugh ? Can you lift a serene 
face against the whisper that poisons your name with obloquy ? 
Can you set unconquerable virtue against the seductions of the 
flesh ? Can you give the care of the tongue to charity and cau- 
tion ? Can you resist the soft encroachments of sloth, and force 
your mind and your body to that activity which duty demands ? 
These are the real difficulties which appall and press heavy 
upon a serious mind.' " Cabot, 84. These sentiments of the 
youth of one and twenty always sounded unfamiliar, if not 
morbid, to the mature author ; but the rhythm of the lines is 
unique among the poet's verses. 

For a view of the Canterbury house and other interesting 
memorials, see Dr. David Greene Haskins's Emerson's Maternal 



GOOD-BYE. 79 

Long I 've been tossed like the driven foam ; 5 

But now, proud world ! I 'm going home. 

Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face ; 

To Grandeur with his wise grimace ; 

To upstart Wealth's averted eye ; 

To supple Office, low and high ; 10 

To crowded halls, to court and street ; 

To frozen hearts and hasting feet ; 

To those who go, and those who come ; 

Good-bye, proud world ! I 'm going home. 

I am going to my own hearth-stone, 15 

Bosomed in yon green hills alone, — 

A secret nook in a pleasant land, 

Whose groves the frolic fairies planned ; 

Where arches green, the livelong day, 

Echo the blackbird's roundelay, 20 

And vulgar feet have never trod 

A spot that is sacred to thought and God. 

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, 

I tread on the pride of Greece and Kome ; 

And when I am stretched beneath the pines, 25 

Where the evening star so holy shines, 

Ancestors, Boston, 1887, pp. 85, 149. The Boston Park Com- 
mission sold the house for twenty dollars on June 2, 1884 ; but 
they have named a portion of Franklin Park " Schoolmaster's 
Hill," and in the natural rock at one end of the Outlook over- 
looking Canterbury Street have set a bronze plate, inscribed : 
"Near this Rock, A. d. 1823-1825 was the house of School- 
master Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here some of his earlier poems 
were written ; among them that from which the following lines 
are taken." And then the last stanza of this poem is quoted, — a 
most fitting memorial of the interesting spot and its associations. 



80 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, 
At the sophist schools and the learned clan ; 
For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
When man in the bush with God may meet ? 



CHARACTER.* 

The sun set, but set not his hope : 

Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up : 

Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 

Deeper and older seemed his eye ; 

And matched his sufferance sublime s 

The taciturnity of time. 

He spoke, and words more soft than rain 

Brought the Age of Gold again : 

His action won such reverence sweet 

As hid all measure of the feat. 10 

* Although these lines were suggested by the character of Em- 
erson's brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, nothing could more fitly 
describe the character and manner of Emerson himself than this 
motto, taken from The Poet, an early poem never published by 
him, but included in the appendix to the volume issued after his 
death. On the impression made by Emerson's bodily presence, 
see his son's charming picture of " the citizen and villager and 
householder, the friend and neighbor," E. W. E., 147-149; 
Lowell, Emerson the Lecturer, in the Riverside Edition of his 
works, i, 349-360; chaps, viii and xvi of Cabot; chaps, xiv and 
xviii of Cooke; chap, xvi of Holmes; and the numerous reminis- 
cences by personal friends like C. A. Bartol, E. P. Whipple, O. 
B. Frothingham, F. B. Sanborn, Alex. Ireland, George Brad- 
ford, M. D. Conway, J. B. Thayer, W. H. Furness, and others. 
See, especially, " The Portraits of Emerson " (illus.), by F. B. 
Sanborn, in the New England Magazine, December, 1896. 

7. His voice had a great charm (Cabot, 570), his smile was 
a sunbeam in his face (Cooke, 193), and his whole manner was 



TERMINUS. 81 



TERMINUS.* 

It is time to be old, 

To take in sail : — 

The god of bounds, 

Who sets to seas a shore, 

Came to me in his fatal rounds, 5 

And said : " No more ! 

No farther shoot 

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root. 

Fancy departs : no more invent ; 

Contract thy firmament 10 

To compass of a tent. 

There 's not enough for this and that, 

Make thy option which of two ; 

Economize the failing river, 

Not the less revere the Giver, 15 

Leave the many and hold the few. 

noble and gracious (0. W. H., 360). " There was a majesty 
about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually 
dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if 
ever, only rise in spurts," writes Lowell. " He is as sweetly 
high-minded as ever, and when one meets him the Fall of Adam 
seems a false report." See Appendix, p. 94. 

* Emerson's son, returning from the West, December, I860, 
met his father in New York, just setting out for his winter's lec- 
turing in the West, and spent the night with him. " He read 
me some poems," he writes, " that he was soon to publish in 
his new volume, May-Day, and among them Terminus. I was 
startled ; for he, looking so healthy, so full of life and young in 
spirit, was reading his deliberate acknowledgment of failing 
forces and his trusting serene acquiescence. I think he smiled as 
he read." E. W. E., 183. " The poem is one of his noblest," 
says Dr. Holmes ; "he could not fold his robes about him with 
more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines." 



82 LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

Timely wise accept the terms, 

Soften the fall with wary foot ; 

A little while 

Still plan and smile, 20 

And, fault of novel germs, 

Mature the unfallen fruit. 

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, 

Bad husbands of their fires, 

Who, when they gave thee breath, 25 

Failed to bequeath 

The needful sinew stark as once, 

The Baresark marrow to thy bones, 

But left a legacy of ebbing veins, 

Inconstant heat and nerveless reins, — 30 

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, 

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb." 

As the bird trims her to the gale, 
I trim myself to the storm of time, 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 35 

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime : 
" Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed ; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed." 40 

23-32. Cf. the fragments, written in feeble health, 1827-31, 
ix, 290-292 : — 



and 



" I bear in youth the sad infirmities 
That use to undo the limb and sense of age," etc (1827). 

" Be of good cheer, brave spirit ; steadfastly 
Serve that low whisper thou hast served," etc. (1831). 



37. " O friend, never strike sail to a fear ! Come into port 
greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain yon live, for 
every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision." Heroism, 
ii, 244. 



APPENDIX. 

Some of the longer illustrative notes have been reserved for 
an appendix, in order to relieve the page where they properly 
belong. Another editor, or the same editor under different cir- 
cumstances, might easily select other passages equally appropri- 
ate. For educational purposes, it is much more profitable for 
the pupil to read and select the passages himself ; and teachers 
should encourage such reading, selecting special topics for search, 
and giving hints when necessary. For those who have not the 
Riverside edition of the prose works at hand, the following 
selections are appended as specimens of what may be gleaned by 
sympathetic reading ; it is to be hoped, however, that all teach- 
ers who may use this selection will be provided with a set, and 
will read, or have read, to the class, at least the passages referred 
to in the notes. 

Page 1. Concord Hymn. Emerson's Historical Discourse at 
Concord, 1835, which contains a contemporary account of the 
battle from his grandfather's diary (xi, 76-80), gives a vigorous 
prose version of the events compressed into the four simple 
stanzas of the hymn. The first stanza serves most appropriately 
as the inscription upon the second battle monument, set up in 
1875. See Boston, 63, note, p. 13. 

Page 2. Right thoufeelest, rush to do. "The Southerner lives 
for the moment — relies on himself and conquers by personal 
address. He is wholly there in that thing which is now to be 
done. The Northerner lives for the year, and does not rely on 
himself, but on the whole apparatus of means he is wont to 
employ : he is only half present when he comes in person ; he 
has a great reserved force which is coming up. The result cor- 
responds. The Southerner is haughty, wilful, generous, unscru- 
pulous ; will have his way and has it. The Northerner must 
think the thing over, and his conscience and his common-sense 
throw a thousand obstacles between himself and his wishes, 



84 APPENDIX. 

which perplex his decision and unsettle his behavior. The 
Northerner always has the advantage at the end of ten years, 
and the Southerner always has the advantage to-day." (From a 
lecture on " New England," 1843, quoted in Cabot, 594.) How 
was this distinction between the impulsive and reflective tempera- 
ment illustrated by the behavior of the North during the twenty 
years succeeding this lecture ? How by the conduct of Emerson 
himself ? 

Page 2. 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 

When for the truth he ought to die. 

This noble quatrain is inscribed on the monument at Soldier's 
Field, the playground of Harvard College, dedicated to the 
memory of the donor's classmates who gave up their lives on 
the battlefield. Quoted also in the Essay on Character, x, 98. 

" When, in the winter of 1838, Emerson had moved his culti- 
vated Boston hearers with his lecture on Heroism, and carried 
them with him in full tide of sympathy with unselfish courage 
to the death, in causes forlorn until the hero assumed them, he 
suddenly said, looking in their eyes : ' The day never shines in 
which this element may not work. ... It is but the other day 
that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of the mob, 
for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was 
better not to live.' ii, 247. A cold shudder ran through the 
audience at the calm braving of public opinion, says an eye- 
witness." E. W. E., 85. Cf . Cabot, 586. " The audience had 
been ' carried on and lifted up ' by the speaker's celebrations of 
heroism in other lands and ancient times, but when he recognized 
a hero in the lynched abolitionist ' they were wholly unprepared 
for this unexpected turn and shock.' " Conway, 300. 

Page 5. Heroism. " Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is 
the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last 
defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that 
can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, 
generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, 
and scornful of being scorned. It persists ; it is of an undoubted 
boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the 
littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on 
health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. Hero- 
ism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall 
it say, then, to the sugar-plums and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, 
compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard which rack the wit of 



APPENDIX. 85 

all society ? What joys has kind nature provided for us dear 
creatures ! There seems to be no interval between greatness 
and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the world, then 
it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so inno- 
cently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red and 
dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending to his own health, lay- 
ing traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a 
horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, 
that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest non- 
sense." ii, 237, 238. 

" The natural measure of this power (character) is the resist- 
ance of circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is re- 
flected in opinions, events, and persons. They cannot see the 
action until it is done. Yet its moral element preexisted in the 
actor, and its quality as right or wrong it was easy to predict. 
Feeble souls look at the profit or hurt of the action. They never 
behold a principle until it is lodged in a person. The hero sees 
that the event is ancillary ; it must follow him." iii, 96, 265. 

Read the essays on Self-Reliance, Spiritual Laws, and Over- 
Soul, and select from other works of Emerson other expressions 
of this cardinal principle of his philosophy. See pp. 72, 92. 

Page 6. The word of the Lord by night, 
To the watching Pilgrims came. 

"What brought the Pilgrims here ? One man says, civil lib- 
erty ; another, the desire of founding a church ; and a third 
discovers that the motive force was plantation and trade. But 
if the Puritans could rise from the dust, they could not an- 
swer. It is to be seen in what they were, and not in what they 
designed ; it was the growth and expansion of the human race, 
and resembled herein the sequent Revolution, which was not 
begun in Concord, or Lexington, or Virginia, but was the over- 
flowing of the sense of natural right in every clear and active 
spirit of the period." Method of Nature, i, 208, 209. Compare 
the lecture on Results, 1843, Cabot, 748. 

Page 8. ' T is nobleness to serve. 

" He that feeds men serveth few, 
He serves all who dares be true." ix, 105. 

Page 9. Pay ransom to the owner. Emerson, at the beginning 
of the anti-slavery conflict, advocated purchase. " I say buy, — 
never conceding the right of the planter to own, but that we 
may acknowledge the calamity of his position, and bear a coun- 



86 APPENDIX. 

tryman's share in relieving him ; and because it is the only 
practicable course and is innocent." Cabot, 592 ; O. W. H., 211. 
"A thousand millions were cheap." Cabot, 584. How many 
millions did the war cost ? Neither side approved Emerson's 
plan ; and when the settlement was taking place, as Dr. Holmes 
said, " in a different currency, — in steel and not in gold," Em- 
erson adapted his plan to the new situation in this fiery stanza. 

Page 10. The world was made for honest trade. In one of 
Emerson's latest public utterances, the address on " The 
Scholar," at the University of Virginia, June 28, 1876, he ex- 
presses again his oft-repeated sympathy with the man of affairs. 
"The scholar has a deep ideal interest in the moving show 
around him. We have — have we not? — a real relation to 
markets and brokers, and currency and coin. Gentlemen, I do 
not wish to check your impulses to action. I have no quarrel 
with action ; only I prefer no action to misaction, and I reject the 
abusive application of the term practical to those lower activities. 
Let us hear no more of the practical men, or I will tell you some- 
thing of them, — this, namely, that the scholar finds in them un- 
looked-for acceptance of his most paradoxical experience. There 
is confession in their eyes; and if they parade their business and 
public importance, it is by way of apology and palliation for not 
being the students and obeyers of those diviner laws. Talk 
frankly with them and you learn that you have little to tell them ; 
that the Spirit of the Age has been before you with influences 
impossible to parry or resist. The dry goods men and the 
brokers, the lawyers and the manufacturers, are idealists, and 
only differ from the philosopher in the intensity of the charge. We 
are all contemporaries and bones of one body." x, 256. Cf. i, 95. 
Page 15. Boston. Compare Emerson's righteous indignation 
upon the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 : " We can- 
not answer for the Union, but we must keep Massachusetts true. 
Let the attitude of the State be firm. Massachusetts is a little 
State. Countries have been great by ideas. Europe is little 
compared with Asia and Africa. Greece was the least part of 
Europe. Attica is a little part of that, one tenth of the size of 
Massachusetts, yet that district still rules the intellects of men. 
Judsea was a petty country. Yet these two, Greece and Judsea 
furnish the mind and the heart by which the rest of the world is 
sustained. And Massachusetts is little, but we must make it 
great by making every man in it true. Let us respect the 



APPENDIX. 87 

Union to all honest ends, but let us also respect an older and 
wider union, — the laws of nature and rectitude. Massachusetts 
is as strong as the universe when it does that." Cabot, 584. 

" Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province 
or continent ; he is the common property of mankind ; and yet we 
love to think of him as breathing the same air and treading the 
same soil that we and our fathers and our children have breathed 
and trodden. So it pleases us to think how fondly he remem- 
bered his birthplace ; and by the side of Franklin's bequest to 
his native city we treasure that golden verse of Emerson's, 
' A blessing through the ages thus,' " etc. O. W. H., 407. 

Page 38. Two Rivers. "The Journal of 1856 shows the Two 
Rivers, perhaps the most musical of his poems, as the thought 
first came to him by the river-bank, and was then brought into 
form. 

" ' Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid, and repeats the music of 
the rain ; but sweeter is the silent stream which flows even through 
thee, as thou through the land. 

" ' Thou art shut in thy banks, but the stream I love flows in 
thy water, and flows through rocks, and through the air, and 
through rays of light as well, and through darkness, and through 
men and women. 

" • I hear and see the inundation and the eternal spending of 
the stream in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in 
passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it. 

"'I see thy brimming, eddying stream 
And thy enchantment, 
For thou changest every rock in thy bed 
Into a gem, 
All is opal and agate, 
And at will thou pavest with diamonds : 
Take them away from the stream 
And they are poor shards and flints. 
So it is with me to-day.' " E. W. E., 232. 

Page 39. Sea-Shore. " The day after his return to Concord " 
(from a week's stay on Cape Ann), writes Emerson's son, "he 
entered my mother's room, where all of us were sitting, with 
his Journal in his hand, and said : ' I came in yesterday from 
walking on the rocks, and wrote down what the sea had said to 
me ; and to-day, when I open my book, I find that it all reads in 
blank verse, with scarcely a change. Listen ! ' And he read it 
to us. Here is the passage from the Journal, which needed little 



88 APPENDIX. 

alteration, part of which he made while reading, for its final 
form, ' Sea-Shore : ' — 

" ' July 23. Returned from Pigeon Cove, where we have 
made acquaintance with the sea for seven days. 'T is a noble, 
friendly power, and seemed to say to me, Why so late and slow 
to come to me ? Am I not here always, thy proper summer 
home ? Is not my voice thy needful music ; my breath thy 
healthful climate in the heats ; my touch thy cure ? Was ever 
building like my terraces ? Was ever couch so magnificent as 
mine ? Lie down on my warm ledges, and learn that a very 
little hut is all you need. I have made this architecture super- 
fluous, and it is paltry beside mine. Here are twenty Homes and 
Ninevehs and Karnacs in ruins together, obelisk and pyramid 
and Giants' Causeway; here they all are, prostrate or half piled. 
And behold the sea, the opaline, plentiful and strong, yet beauti- 
ful as the rose or the rainbow, full of food, nourisher of men, 
purger of the world, creating a sweet climate, and in its un- 
changeable ebb and flow, and in its beauty at a few furlongs, 
giving a hint of that which changes not and is perfect.'" 
E. W.E.,22A. 

Page 48. It seemed as if the sparrows taught him. " He knew 
how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the 
bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should 
come back and resume its habits, — nay, moved by curiosity, 
should come to him and watch him. . . . Snakes coiled round 
his leg ; the fishes swam into his hand (Conway, 287, 313), and 
he took them out of the water ; he pulled the woodchuck out of 
its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection 
from the hunters. . . . Though a naturalist, he used neither 
trap nor gun." Thoreau, x, 437, 440. Cf. x, 152. 

Page 48. Many haps fall in the field. " He noted what re- 
peatedly befell him, — that after receiving from a distance a 
rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts, 
and those pieces of luck which happen only to good players hap- 
pened to him. One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired 
where Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, 'Every- 
where,' and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from 
the ground. At Mt. Washington, in Tuckerman's Ravine, 
Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in 
the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the 
leaves of the Arnica 7nollis. ,, x, 432. 



APPENDIX. 89 

Page 48. He saw the partridge drum in the woods. "His 
powers of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. 
He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his 
memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. 
And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that 
imports but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. 
Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and 
beauty of the whole." x, 439. 

Page 52. To the open ear it sings, Sweet the genesis of things. 

NATURE. 
A subtle chain of countless rings 
The next unto the farthest brings : 
The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose ; 
And striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form. i, 7. 

This was published as early as 1849, ten years before Darwin's 
Origin of Species ; it may have been written as early as Nature 
itself, for the same thought occurs in a lecture on Humanity of 
Science, December 15, 1836: " Lamarck finds a monad of organic 
life common to every animal, and becoming a worm, a mastiff, 
or a mau, according to circumstances. He says to the cater- 
pillar, How dost thou, brother ? Please God, you shall yet be 
a philosopher." Cabot, 725. And in his second public lecture, 
On the Relation of Man to the Globe, December, 1832, we find 
similar ready acceptance of radical hints from the scientific 
men : " The brother of the hand existed ages ago in the nipper 
of the seal." Cf. 

" And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
What it will do when it is man." 

Bacchus, ix, 112. 

" Onward and on, the eternal Pan, 
Who layeth the world's incessant plan, 
Halteth never in one shape, 
But forever doth escape, 
Like wave or flame, into new forms 
Of gem and air, of plants and worms." 

Woodnotes, II, ix, 56. 

In a similar way Emerson anticipated the telephone, writing 
in 1855, when daguerreotypes were just becoming common : 
" By new arts the Earth is subdued, and we are on the brink of 
new wonders. The Sun paints ; presently we shall organize the 
echo as we now do the shadow." Cabot, 584. 

Page 02. / yielded myself to the perfect ivhole. Cf. Michael 



90 APPENDIX. 

Angelo, xii, 118 ; Nature, chap, hi, i, 29; vi, 287, 288. Nature and 
Michael Angelo were almost the earliest of Emerson's printed 
works, — Nature, " the first clear manifesto of Emerson's genius," 
begun in 1833, published in 1836 ; and Michael Angelo, one of 
his first lectures, in January, 1835, published January, 1837 ; 
and this fundamental doctrine, thus early enunciated, was re- 
peated with variations, not only in the essays on Art, ii, 327 
(1836), Beauty, vi, 265, and Art, viii, 39, but in almost every- 
thing he wrote, from the Journal at sea, September 8, 1833, — 
" It is the old revelation that perfect beauty is perfect good- 
ness " {Cabot, 202), — to the Virginia Address, June 28, 1876 
(the last utterance not previously delivered as a lecture), in 
which he commends the " First G ood, of which Plato affirms 
that all things are for its sake, and it is the cause of everything 
beautiful." x, 258; E. W. E., 254. 

" Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
But it carves the bow of beauty there, 
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 

Woodnotes, II, ix, 53. 

" As for beauty," said Ellery Channing, voyaging on Concord 
River with Emerson, " I need not look beyond an oar's length 
for my fill of it." " I do not know whether he used the expres- 
sion with design or no," writes Emerson in his Journal (1846), 
" but my eye rested on the charming play of light on the water 
which he was striking with his paddle. I fancied I had never 
seen such color, such transparency, such eddies." And the "be- 
witching succession " of the colors he saw, he subsequently re- 
produced in the above equally beautiful and rhythmic verses. 

Page 65. The hand that rounded Peter's dome 
Wrought in a sad sincerity. 

" Few lives of eminent men are harmonious ; few that furnish, 
in all the facts, an image corresponding with their fame. But 
all things recorded of Michael Angelo Buonarotti agree together. 
He lived one life ; he pursued one career. He accomplished ex- 
traordinary works ; he uttered extraordinary words ; and in this 
greatness was so little eccentricity, so true was he to the laws 
of the human mind, that his character and his works, like Sir 
Isaac Newton's, seem rather a part of nature than arbitrary 
productions of the human will. . . . ' He nothing common did, 
or mean,' and, dying at the end of near ninety years, had not yet 
become old, but was engaged in executing his grand conceptions 



APPENDIX. 91 

in the ineffaceable architecture of St. Peter's. . . . He was not 
a citizen of any country ; he belonged to the human race ; he 
was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledge the beauty 
that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self- 
denial to approach its source in perfect goodness." Michael 
Angelo, xii, 115, 116, 142. 

Page 65. Himself from God he could not free : 
He builded better than he knew ; 
The conscious stone to beauty grew. 

"The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the 
artist's work, and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagi- 
nation. As far as the spiritual character of the period over- 
powers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will 
retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders 
the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite 
exclude this element of Necessity from his labor. No man can 
quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce 
a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, 
and arts of his times shall have no share. Though he were 
never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe 
out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. 
The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will 
and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes, and 
the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to 
share the manner of his times, without knowing what that man- 
ner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher 
charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the 
artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a 
gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the human race." 
ii, 328. See page 92. 

Page 66. For out of Thought's interior sphere 
These wonders rose to upper air. 

" The universal soul is the alone creator of the useful and the 
beautiful ; therefore, to make anything useful or beautiful, the 
individual must be submitted to the universal mind. ... He 
seems to take his task so minutely from imitations of Nature 
that his works become as it were hers, and he is no longer free. 
. . . The artist who is to produce a work which is to be ad- 
mired, not by his friends or his townspeople or his contempora- 
ries, but by all men, and which is to be more beautiful to the 
eye in proportion to its culture, must disindividualize himself 



92 APPENDIX. 

and be a man of no party and no manner and no age, but one 
through whom the soul of all men circulate as the common air 
through his lungs" (like Michael Angelo, p. 90, above). "He 
must work in the spirit in which we conceive a prophet to speak, 
or an angel of the Lord to act ; that is, he is not to speak his 
own words, or do his own works, or think his own thoughts, but 
he is to be an organ through which the universal mind acts. . . . 
The wonders of Shakspeare are things which he saw whilst he 
stood aside, and then returned to record them." " Good poetry 
could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time 
you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible 
tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by 
the poet. The feeling of all great poets has accorded with this. 
They found the verse, not made it. The muse brought it to 
them." vii, 44, 45, 51-53. Cf. i, 201. Does this apply to 
" The Problem " ? " The volume of Emerson's Poems seems 
to open at this place of its own accord, and the thrilling lines 
have been so often read that they seem to have always existed," 
writes a critic {North American Review, 130 : 495), who thinks 
that " this poem, as a whole, has more depth of thought, imag- 
inative insight, and power of expression than any since the time 
of Milton." 

Page 66. The passive Master lent his hand 

To the vast soul that o'er him planned. 

" He knows that he did not make his thought, — no, his 
thought made him, and made the sun and stars. . . . We can- 
not look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to 
creating. Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that 
made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains 
in him, and he a mortal man ! In him and the like perfecter 
brains the instinct is resistless, knows the right way, is melodi- 
ous, and at all points divine." - viii, 42. 

Page 72. Sursum Corda. " A man is relieved and gay when 
he has put his heart into his work and done his best, but what 
he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a 
deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius 
deserts him ; no muse befriends ; no invention, no hope. Trust 
thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string." ii, 49. 

9. " Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping 
man. For him all doors are flung wide ; him all tongues greet, 
all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes 



APPENDIX. 93 

out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We 
solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because 
he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods 
love him because men hated him. ' To the persevering mor- 
tal,' said Zoroaster, ' the blessed Immortals are swift.' " ii, 77. 
" He who confronts the gods without any misgiving knows 
heaven." iii, 108. Cf. The World-Soul, 93, p. 58. In other 
words, the renunciation of the claim to happiness is the begin- 
ning of happiuess, as Emerson's friend Carlyle had said in Sar- 
tor Resartus (1833) : " The Fraction of Life can be increased in 
value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your 
Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself 
divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages 
a zero, then : thou hast the world under thy feet. . . . There 
is in man a higher than Love of Happiness : he can do with- 
out happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness. . . . ' Do 
the Duty ivhich lies nearest thee ! ' which thou knowest to be a 
Duty ! thy second Duty will already become clearer. The Sit- 
uation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied 
by man. Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered Actual, 
wherein even now thou standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal : 
work it out therefrom ; and working believe, live, and be free. 
. . . Up, up ! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with 
thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day ; for the 
Night cometh, wherein no man can work." The Everlasting 
Yea, Book II, chap. ix. 

" On bravely through the sunshine and the showers ! 
Time hath his work to do, and we have ours." x, 229. 

Page 75. Stephen de la Boetie, 1530-1563. " If a man urge 
me to tell wherefore I loved him," writes Montaigne, " I feele it 
cannot be expressed, but by answering : Because it was he, be- 
cause it was my selfe. . . . We sought one another before we 
had seene one another, and by the reports we heard of one 
another ; I thinke by some secret ordinance of the heavens, we 
embraced one another by our names. And at our first meeting, 
which was by chance at a great feast, we found our selves so 
surprised, so knowne, so acquainted, and so combinedly bound 
together, that from thence forward, no thing was so neer unto 
us as one unto another s." From the seven and twentieth chap- 
ter of the Essaycs, translated by John Florio (1003), which con- 



94 APPENDIX. 

tains an account of this friendship, " that it may be counted a 
wonder if fortune once in three ages contract the like." Cf. 
Lewes, Life of Goethe. 

Page 80. " His action won such reverence sweet 
As hid all measure of the feat." 

"There is a vague nobleness and thorough sweetness about 
him," wrote Harriet Martineau, " which move people to their 
very depths without their being able to explain why. The logi- 
cians have an incessant triumph over him, but their triumph is 
of no avail. He conquers minds as well as hearts wherever 
he goes, and, without convincing anybody's reason of any one 
thing, exalts their reason and makes their minds of more worth 
than they ever were before." Cf . Cabot, 296, 297. 

To R. W. Emerson. 

Elmwood, October 14, 1868. 
My dear Sir, — If you had known what a poem your two 
tickets contained for me, how much they recalled, how many 
vanished faces of thirty years ago, how much gratitude for all 
you have been and are to us younger men (a debt I always love 
to acknowledge, though I can never repay it), you would not 
have dreamed of my not being an eager hearer during the whole 
course. Even were I not sure (as I always am with you) of 
having what is best in me heightened and strengthened, I should 
go, out of loyalty to what has been one of the great privileges of 
my life. I, for one, 

" Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime," 
and you may be sure of one pair of ears in which the voice is 
always musical and magisterial too. . . . 

I am gratefully and affectionately 

Your liegeman, 

J. R. Lowell.* 

It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in 
prose and verse must live as long as the language lasts ; but 
whether it live or fade from memory, the influence of his great 
and noble life and the spoken and written words which were its 
exponents, blends, indestructible, with the enduring elements 
of civilization. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

* From The Letters of James Russell Lowell. Copyright, 1893, by Harper & 
Brothers. 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC 
AND OTHER AMERICAN ADDRESSES 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION 



CONTENTS 



* 

PAGE 

Introduction 3 

The Fortune of the Republic 15 

The Young American 46 

American Civilization 76 

The Emancipation Proclamation 90 

Abraham Lincoln 101 

The American Scholar .... . 110 



INTRODUCTION. 



The following collection of Essays is the first 
selection from Emerson's writings which has been 
issued in the Riverside Literature Series. The 
natural order of writers in American literature 
makes Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Lowell, 
and Whittier precede Emerson, and both teachers 
and scholars are likely to think of Emerson as 
belonging more exclusively to readers of mature 
minds. Yet many of his most notable addresses 
were given before audiences of young men and 
women, and out of the great body of his writings 
it is not difficult to find many passages which go 
straight to the intelligence of boys and girls in 
school. The plan of this series forbids the use of 
extracts, or many numbers might be filled with 
striking and appropriate passages from Emerson's 
writings ; but there are certain essays and ad- 
dresses which, though they may contain some 
knotty sentences, are in the main so interesting to 
boys and girls who have begun to think, they are 
so inspiring and yield s<? much to any one who wi21 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

take a little trouble to use his mind, that it is ob- 
viously desirable to bring them in convenient form 
to the attention of schools. Some of the best 
things in literature we ©an get only by digging for 
them ; and there is great satisfaction in reading 
again and again masterpieces like the Essays in 
this collection, with a fresh pleasure in each read- 
ing as new ideas spring up in the mind of the 
attentive reader. 

The fullest as it is the authoritative Life of 
Emerson is that by his literary executor, Mr. J. 
Elliot Cabot ; but there is a shorter one in the 
American Men of Letters series by Dr. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, and a personal sketch, Emerson 
in Concord, by Dr. Edward W. Emerson, a son 
of the poet. Mr. George Willis Cooke, in his 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Life, Writings, and 
Philosophy, supplies many interesting facts, and 
helps the student to an understanding of the philos- 
opher. There has also been published The Corre- 
spondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, and a great number of review articles, 
which may be found by consulting Poole's Index. 

His father, his grandfather, and his great-grand- 
father were all ministers, and indeed, on both his 
father's and mother's side, he belonged to an un- 
broken line of ministerial descent from the earliest 
settlers in New England. His ancestral home was 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

in Concord, Massachusetts, but at the time of his 
birth his father, the Rev. William Emerson, was 
minister of the First Church congregation in Bos- 
ton. In Boston, then, he was born May 25, 1803. 
His father died when he was seven years old, but 
his mother continued to live in the parish house 
and to care for her family of five boys and a girl, 
all under ten years of age. Her one desire was to 
give these children an education, and for this she 
bore privations and endured hardships, which they 
shared bravely. During one year in the War of 
1812, when the stoppage of commerce had made 
provisions high, Mrs. Emerson took her children 
to Concord and lived with them in the Old Manse 
which Hawthorne has described delightfully in his 
introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse. In 
that manse Emerson's grandfather was living when 
the Concord fight occurred. 

Emerson was graduated at Harvard College in 
1821, and after teaching a year or two gave him- 
self to the study of divinity. He was not robust, 
there was a taint of consumption in the family, and 
he interrupted his study to travel in the South. 
His letters written at this time show that he was 
restless, and hard to be restrained within the 
bounds of the ministerial profession as it was then 
regarded in New England. He preached, however, 
from 1827 to 1832, and was for four years a col- 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

league pastor over the Second Church in Boston. 
His wife, whom he married in 1829, died in 1831, 
and his own health was precarious. The work of 
a preacher was not distasteful, but he had no apti- 
tude for pastoral work, and he was out of sympa- 
thy with much that seemed to his associates essen- 
tial in church order. The profession, which he had 
entered almost from necessity, since there was no 
other at that time in America which invited a stu- 
dent of Emerson's gifts and tastes, no longer 
seemed to him adjusted to his needs ; it slipped 
from him, he resigned his pastorate; and though 
he preached occasionally afterward, he became 
thereafter distinctly a writer, maintaining himself 
mainly by lecturing, and living in a plain manner 
at Concord. 

There was an intellectual ferment in New Eng- 
land when Emerson was in his early manhood, and 
he was himself one of the special and active agents 
in stirring the minds of men. Changes were tak- 
ing place in the way in which people looked at 
education, religion, politics, and society. A great 
many subjects were discussed for which there 
seemed to be no place either in the pulpit or in 
legislatures, and those who had something to say 
were in great demand as lecturers. Public enter- 
tainments were not so varied then as now, nor so 
common, and people flocked to halls and meeting- 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

houses to hear lectures. Emerson, though not the 
most popular, was the most celebrated of these lec- 
turers, and frequently gave courses of lectures in 
Boston and elsewhere. He was called upon also 
to speak at college commencements and on other 
special occasions, and it was rather through these 
lectures and addresses than through his printed 
books that, for a long time, he made himself 
known to men. 

He made a voyage to Europe in 1833 on ac- 
count of ill-health, and during his journey visited 
Thomas Carlyle, then scarcely more known than 
Emerson himself, who had, however, discovered 
his genius in his writings. From this beginning 
there grew one of the notable friendships which 
sometimes mark the association of intellectual men. 
Emerson went to Europe again in 1847, with spe- 
cial reference to courses of lectures which he had 
been invited to give in England. He made a 
third visit in 1872, and on these two occasions 
made and renewed acquaintance with leading 
thinkers and poets. Except for his lecturing tours 
and these journeys, and for one made across the 
continent in 1871 which has been agreeably re- 
corded by James Bradley Thayer in his little vol- 
ume, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson, he 
spent his life quietly in Concord. He was mar- 
ried a second time in 1835, and died at Concord 
April 27, 1882. 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

His first published prose work was Nature, in 
1839. He wrote poems when in college, but his 
first publication of verse was in The Dial, a maga- 
zine established in 1840, and the representative of 
a knot of men and women of whom Emerson was 
the acknowledged or unacknowledged leader. The 
first volume of his poems was published in 1847, 
and the second twenty years later. Meanwhile he 
put forth successive volumes of prose, and in the 
latest collective edition of his writings, the ^River- 
side Edition, there is one volume of verse and ten 
of prose. 

In form the prose is either the oration or the 
essay, with one exception. English Traits records 
the observations of the writer after his first two 
journeys to England ; and while it may loosely be 
classed among essays, it has certain distinctive 
features which separate it from the essays of the 
same writer ; there is in it narrative, reminiscence, 
and description, which make it more properly the 
note-book of a philosophic traveller. 

Under the term " oration " may be included all 
those writings of Emerson which were delivered 
originally as lectures, addresses, orations before 
literary and learned societies and on special occa- 
sions. It may be said of his essays as well as of his 
deliberate orations that the writer never was wholly 
unmindful of an audience ; he was conscious always 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

that he was not merely delivering his mind, but 
speaking directly to men. One is aware of a cer- 
tain pointedness of speech which turns the writer 
into a speaker, and the printed words into a sound- 
ing voice. Especially if one ever heard Emerson 
does his impressive manner disclose itself in every 
sentence that one reads. In the orations, however, 
this directness of speech is most apparent, and 
their form is cast for it. The end of the speech is 
kept more positively before the speaker ; there is 
also more distinct eloquence, that raising of the 
voice, by which the volume of an utterance is in- 
creased and a note of thought is prolonged. The 
form of the oration requires, moreover, a somewhat 
brisker manner and crisper sentences, for the 
speaker knows that the hearer has no leisure to 
pursue his way by winding clauses. 

Yet the spirit of the essay, the other great divi- 
sion of Emerson's writing, more distinctly enters 
into the oration. It is true that in whatever he 
writes Emerson feels his audience, but it is an au- 
dience of thinking men, and he is not unwilling to 
give his best thought, and to surrender himself in 
his work to the leadings of his own thought. " Come 
with me," he seems to say to reader or listener ; 
" we will follow courageously in this theme whither- 
soever Thought leads us : " thus in essay or oration 
he is less desirous of proving a proposition, or stat- 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

ing roundly something which he has discovered, 
than of entering upon a subject and letting his mind 
work freely upon it, gathering suggestions by the 
way, and asking for its association with other sub- 
jects. Hence, to one unaccustomed to Emerson's 
mind, a first reading of his writings seems to dis- 
close only a series of lightly connected epigrams, 
or searching questions and answers. The very 
titles of the essays seem mere suggestions, and the 
end of an essay brings with it no conclusion. In 
the essay proper he allows himself more freedom 
than in the oration, and his sentences do not con- 
verge so distinctly toward some demonstrable 
point. The discursive character of his thought is 
best fitted to the essay form, where it is not neces- 
sary to make provision beforehand for every idea 
which is to be entertained, and where the perfec- 
tion of form is in the graceful freedom from for- 
malism. The oration may be described as one 
great sentence ; the essay, as an unrestricted suc- 
cession of little sentences. 

" In writing my thoughts," Emerson once said, 
"I seek no order, or harmony, or result. I am 
not careful to see how they comport with other 
thoughts and other moods : I trust them for that. 
Any more than how any one minute of the year is 
related to any other remote minute, which yet I 
know is so related. The thoughts and the minutes 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

obey their own magnetisms, and will certainly re- 
veal them in time." And in his journal he wrote : 
"If Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I 
would say, Give me continuity. I am tired of 
scraps. I do not wish to be a literary or intellect- 
ual chiffonier. Away with this Jew's rag-bag of 
ends and tufts of brocade, velvet, and cloth-of-gold, 
and let me spin some yards or miles of helpful 
twine ; a clew to lead to one kingly truth ; a cord 
to bind wholesome and belonging facts." 

Mr. Cabot tells us that Emerson's practice was, 
" when a sentence had taken shape, to write it out 
in his journal, and leave it to find its fellows after- 
wards. These journals, paged and indexed, were 
the quarry from which he built his lectures and es- 
says. When he had a paper to get ready, he took 
the material collected under the particular heading, 
and added whatever suggested itself at the mo- 
ment. The proportion thus added seems to have 
varied considerably ; it was large in the early time, 
say to about 1846, and sometimes very small in 
the later essays." 

The single, apparently detached, thoughts im- 
press one with a sense of the author's insight ; 
their very abruptness often lends a positiveness 
and an authority to the statements and convictions, 
and a ready listener finds himself accepting them 
almost without consideration, so captivating are 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

they in their brilliant light. Yet something more 
than a ready listener is needed, if Emerson's writ- 
ings are to be best used. They call for thought 
in the reader ; they demand that one shall stop 
and ask questions, translate what one has read 
into one's ordinary speech, and inquire again if it 
be true. They are excellent tonics for the mind, 
but taken heedlessly they are dangerous. The 
danger is in the careless use, for carelessness 
makes half truths of what has been said frankly 
and fearlessly to the open mind. No one should 
read Emerson who is not willing to have his own 
weakness disclosed to him, and who is not pre- 
pared also to test what he finds by a standard 
which is above both writer and reader. 

As one reads steadily, he is likely to note certain 
mental characteristics in the writer which mark all 
his work. One or two of these characteristics have 
already been mentioned; a more important and 
pervading one is his loyalty to idealism, and his 
belief in the power of the soul to work out a noble 
place for itself. The openness of his mind to new 
thought, his loyalty to high ideals, his eager advo- 
cacy of the real, and his insight into the nature of 
things, have separated him, and made his words 
sometimes unintelligible ; but the serenity of his 
life and the courage of his speech have endeared 
him to men, even when they have thought him 
oblivious to some aspects of human life. 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

It would be easy to cull from Emerson's writ- 
ings both in prose and verse many detached pas- 
sages which spring from a consciousness of Ameri- 
can life. It is more interesting to take certain 
addresses which were called out by national events. 
and to read in them that loyalty to American ideas 
which makes Emerson not only an interpreter of 
these ideas, but an apostle of them. He sees so 
clearly a great America, greater than any mate- 
rial prosperity can show it to be, that when he 
speaks of men and affairs, whether to admire or to 
reprove, he speaks to the best thought of Ameri- 
cans. The Fortune of the Republic was one of 
the last addresses made by Mr. Emerson, and was 
delivered in the Old South Church, Boston, March 
30, 1878. The Young American was a lecture 
read in Boston, February 7, 1844. The other ad- 
dresses gather naturally about President Lincoln 
and the Emancipation Proclamation. The one on 
the Proclamation was delivered in Boston in Sep- 
tember, 1862 ; that on Lincoln, at Concord, April 
19, 1865. 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 



It is a rule that holds in economy as well as in 
hydraulics, that you must have a source higher 
than your tap. The mills, the shops, the theatre 
and the caucus, the college and the church, have all 
found out this secret. The sailors sail by chronom- 
eters that do not lose two or three seconds in a 
year, ever since Newton explained to Parliament 
that the way to improve navigation was to get good 
watches, and to offer public premiums for a better 
time-keeper than any then in use. The manufac- 
turers rely on turbines of hydraulic perfection ; the 
carpet-mill, on mordants and dyes which exhaust 
the skill of the chemist; the calico print, on de- 
signers of genius who draw the wages of artists, 
not of artisans. Wedgwood, the eminent potter, 
bravely took the sculptor Flaxman to counsel, who 
said, " Send to Italy, search the museums for the 
forms of old Etruscan vases, urns, water-pots, do- 
mestic and sacrificial vessels of all kinds." They 
built great works and called their manufacturing 
village Etruria. Flaxman, with his Greek taste, 



16 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

selected and combined the loveliest forms, which 
were executed in English clay ; sent boxes of these 
as gifts to every court of Europe, and formed the 
taste of the world. It was a renaissance of the 
breakfast table and china-closet. The brave manu- 
facturers made their fortune. The jewellers imi- 
tated the revived models in silver and gold. 

The theatre avails itself of the best talent of 
poet, of painter, and of amateur of taste, to make 
the ensemble of dramatic effect. The marine in- 
surance office has its mathematical counsellor to 
settle averages ; the life-assurance, its table of an- 
nuities. The wine merchant has his analyst and 
taster, the more exquisite the better. He has also, 
I fear, his debts to the chemist as well as to the 
vineyard. 

Our modern wealth stands on a few staples, and 
the interest nations took in our war was exasper- 
ated by the importance of the cotton trade. And 
what is cotton ? One plant out of some two hun- 
dred thousand known to the botanist, vastly the 
larger part of which are reckoned weeds. What is 
a weed ? A plant whose virtues have not yet been 
discovered, — every one of the two hundred thou- 
sand probably yet to be of utility in the arts. As 
Bacchus of the vine, Ceres of the wheat, as Ark- 
wright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, 
so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 17 

plant. There is not a property in nature but a 
mind is born to seek and find it. For it is not the 
plants or the animals, innumerable as they are, nor 
the whole magazine of material nature that can give 
the sum of power, but the infinite applicability of 
these things in the hands of thinking man, every 
new application being equivalent to a new material. 

Our sleepy civilization, ever since Roger Bacon 
and Monk Schwartz invented gunpowder, has built 
its whole art of war, all fortification by land and 
sea, all drill and military education, on that one 
compound, — all is an extension of a gun-barrel, — 
and is very scornful about bows and arrows, and 
reckons Greeks and Romans and Middle Ages lit- 
tle better than Indians and bow-and-arrow times. 
As if the earth, water, gases, lightning and caloric 
had not a million energies, the discovery of any one 
of which could change the art of war again, and 
put an end to war by the exterminating forces man 
can apply. 

Now, if this is true in all the useful and in the 
fine arts, that the direction must be drawn from a 
superior source or there will be no good work, does 
it hold less in our social and civil life ? 

In our popular politics you may note that each 
aspirant who rises above the crowd, however at 
first making his obedient apprenticeship in party 
tactics, if he have sagacity, soon learns that it is by 



18 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

no means by obeying the vulgar weathercock of his 
party, the resentments, the fears and whims of it, 
that real power is gained, but that he must often 
face and resist the party, and abide by his resist- 
ance, and put them in fear ; that the only title to 
their permanent respect, and to a larger following, 
is to see for himself what is the real public interest, 
and to stand for that ; — that is a principle, and 
all the cheering and hissing of the crowd must by 
and by accommodate itself to it. Our times easily 
afford you very good examples. 

The law of water and all fluids is true of wit. 
Prince Metternich said, " Kevolutions begin in the 
best heads and run steadily down to the populace." 
It is a very old observation ; not truer because 
Metternich said it, and not less true. 

There have been revolutions which were not in 
the interest of feudalism and barbarism, but in that 
of society. And these are distinguished not by the 
numbers of the combatants nor the numbers of the 
slain, but by the motive. No interest now attaches 
to the wars of York and Lancaster, to the wars of 
German, French and Spanish emperors, which were 
only dynastic wars, but to those in which a princi- 
ple was involved. These are read with passionate 
interest and never lose their pathos by time. When 
the cannon is aimed by ideas, when men with re- 
ligious convictions are behind it, when men die for 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 19 

what they live for, and the mainspring that works 
daily urges them to hazard all, then the cannon ar- 
ticulates its explosions with the voice of a man, then 
the rifle seconds the cannon and the fowling-piece 
the rifle, and the women make the cartridges, and 
all shoot at one mark ; then gods join in the com- 
bat ; then poets are born, and the better code of 
laws at last records the victory. 

Now the culmination of these triumphs of hu- 
manity — and which did virtually include the ex- 
tinction of slavery — is the planting of America. 

At every moment some one country more than 
any other represents the sentiment and the future 
of mankind. None will doubt that America occu- 
pies this place in the opinion of nations, as is 
proved by the fact of the vast immigration into 
this country from all the nations of Western and 
Central Europe. And when the adventurers have 
planted themselves and looked about, they send 
back all the money they can spare to bring their 
friends. 

Meantime they find this country just passing 
through a great crisis in its history, as necessary 
as lactation or dentition or puberty to the human 
individual. We are in these days settling for our- 
selves and our descendants questions which, as they 
shall be determined in one way or the other, will 
make the peace and prosperity or the calamity of 



20 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

the next ages. The questions of Education, of So- 
ciety, of Labor, the direction of talent, of charac- 
ter, the nature and habits of the American, may 
well occupy us, and more the question of Religion. 

The new conditions of mankind in America are 
really favorable to progress, the removal of absurd 
restrictions and antique inequalities. The mind is 
always better the more it is used, and here it is 
kept in practice. The humblest is daily challenged 
to give his opinion on practical questions, and while 
civil and social freedom exists, nonsense even has 
a favorable effect. Cant is good to provoke com- 
mon sense The trance-me- 
diums, the rebel paradoxes, exasperate the common 
sense. The wilder the paradox, the more sure is 
Punch to put it in the pillory. 

The lodging the power in the people, as in re- 
publican forms, has the effect of holding things 
closer to common sense ; for a court or an aristoc- 
racy, which must always be a small minority, can 
more easily run into follies than a republic, which 
has too many observers, — each with a vote in his 
hand, — to allow its head to be turned by any kind 
of nonsense : since hunger, thirst, cold, the cries of 
children, and debt, are always holding the masses 
hard to the essential duties. 

One hundred years ago the American people at- 
tempted to carry out the bill of political rights to 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 21 

an almost ideal perfection. They have made great 
strides in that direction since. They are now pro- 
ceeding, instructed by their success and by their 
many failures, to carry out, not the bill of rights, 
but the bill of human duties. 

And look what revolution that attempt involves. 
Hitherto government has been that of the single 
person or of the aristocracy. In this country the 
attempt to resist these elements, it is asserted, must 
throw us into the government not quite of mobs, 
but in practice of an inferior class of professional 
politicians, who by means of newspapers and cau- 
cuses really thrust their unworthy minority into the 
place of the old aristocracy on the one side, and of 
the good, industrious, well-taught but unambitious 
population on the other, win the posts of power, 
and give their direction to affairs. Hence liberal 
congresses and legislatures ordain, to the surprise 
of the people, equivocal, interested and vicious 
measures. The men themselves are suspected and 
charged with lobbying and being lobbied. No 
measure is attempted for itself, but the opinion of 
the people is courted in the first place, and the 
measures are perfunctorily carried through as sec- 
ondary. We do not choose our own candidate, no, 
nor any other man's first choice, — but only the 
available candidate, whom, perhaps, no man loves. 
We do not speak what we think, but grope after 



22 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

the practicable and available. Instead of charac- 
ter, there is a studious exclusion of character. The 
people are feared and flattered. They are not rep- 
rimanded. The country is governed in bar-rooms, 
and in the mind of bar-rooms. The low can best 
win the low, and each aspirant for power vies with 
his rival which can stoop lowest, and depart widest 
from himself. 

The partisan on moral, even on religious ques- 
tions, will choose a proven rogue who can answer 
the tests, over an honest, affectionate, noble gentle- 
man ; the partisan ceasing to be a man that he may 
be a sectarian. 

The spirit of our political economy is low and 
degrading. The precious metals are not so precious 
as they are esteemed. Man exists for his own sake, 
and not to add a laborer to the state. The spirit 
of our political action, for the most part, considers 
nothing less than the sacredness of man. Party 
sacrifices man to the measure. 

We have seen the great party of property and 
education in the country drivelling and huckstering 
away, for views of party fear or advantage, every 
principle of humanity and the dearest hopes of man- 
kind ; the trustees of power only energetic when 
mischief could be done, imbecile as corpses when 
evil was to be prevented. 

Our great men succumb so far to the forms of 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 23 

the clay as to peril their integrity for the sake of 
adding to the weight of their personal character 
the authority of office, or making a real govern- 
ment titular. Our politics are full of adventurers, 
who having by education and social innocence a 
good repute in the state, break away from the law 
of honesty and think they can afford to join the 
devil's party. 'T is odious, these offenders in high 
life. You rally to the support of old charities and 
the cause of literature, and there, to be sure, are 
these brazen faces. In this innocence you are puz- 
zled how to meet them ; must shake hands with 
them, under protest. We feel toward them as the 
minister about the Cape Cod farm, — in the old 
time when the minister was still invited, in the 
spring, to make a prayer for the blessing of a piece 
of land, — the good pastor being brought to the 
spot, stopped short : " No, this land does not want 
a prayer, this land wants manure." 

" T is virtue which they want, and wanting it, 
Honor no garment to their backs can lit." 

Parties keep the old names, but exhibit a surpris- 
ing fugacity in creeping out of one snake-skin into 
another of equal ignominy and lubricity, and the 
grasshopper on the turret of Faneuil Hall gives a 
proper hint of the men below. 

Everything yields. The very glaciers are vis- 
cous, or regelate into conformity, and the stiffest 



24 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

patriots falter and compromise ; so that will cannot 
be depended on to save us. 

How rare are acts of will ! We are all living 
according to custom ; we do as other people do, and 
shrink from an act of our own. Every such act 
makes a man famous, and we can all count the few 
cases, — half a dozen in our time, — when a public 
man ventured to act as he thought, without waiting 
for orders or for public opinion. John Quincy 
Adams was a man of an audacious independence 
that always kept the public curiosity alive in re- 
gard to what he might do. None could predict his 
word, and a whole congress could not gainsay it 
when it was spoken. General Jackson was a man 
of will, and his phrase on one memorable occasion, 
" I will take the responsibility," is a proverb ever 
since. 

The American marches with a careless swagger 
to the height of power, very heedless of his own lib- 
erty or of other peoples', in his reckless confidence 
that he can have all he wants, risking all the prized 
charters of the human race, bought with battles and 
revolutions and religion, gambling them all away 
for a paltry selfish gain. 

He sits secure in the possession of his vast do- 
main, rich beyond all experience in resources, sees 
its inevitable force unlocking itself in elemental or- 
der day by day, year by year ; looks from his coal- 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 25 

fields, his wheat-bearing prairie, his gold-mines, to 
his two oceans on either side, and feels the security 
that there can be no famine in a country reaching 
through so many latitudes, no want that cannot be 
supplied, no danger from any excess of importation 
of art or learning into a country of such native 
strength, such immense digestive power. 

In proportion to the personal ability of each man, 
he feels the invitation and career which the country 
opens to him. He is easily fed with wheat and 
game, with Ohio wine, but his brain is also pam- 
pered by finer draughts, by political power and by 
the power in the railroad board, in the mills, or the 
banks. This elevates his spirits, and gives, of 
course, an easy self-reliance that makes him self- 
willed and unscrupulous. 

I think this levity is a reaction on the people from 
the extraordinary advantages and invitations of 
their condition. When we are most disturbed by 
their rash and immoral voting, it is not malignity, 
but recklessness. They are careless of politics, be- 
cause they do not entertain the possibility of being 
seriously caught in meshes of legislation. They feel 
strong and irresistible. They believe that what 
they have enacted they can repeal if they do not 
like it. But one may run a risk once too often. 
They stay away from the polls, saying that one vote 
can do no good I Or they take another step, and 



26 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

say One vote can do no harm ! and vote for some- 
thing which they do not approve, because their 
party or set votes for it. Of course this puts them 
in the power of any party having a steady interest 
to promote which does not conflict manifestly with 
the pecuniary interest of the voters. But if they 
should come to be interested in themselves and in 
their career, they would no more stay away from the 
election than from their own counting-room or the 
house of their friend. 

The people are right-minded enough on ethical 
questions, but they must pay their debts, and must 
have the means of living well, and not pinching. 
So it is useless to rely on them to go to a meeting, 
or to give a vote, if any check from this must-have- 
the-money side arises. If a customer looks grave 
at their newspaper, or damns their member of Con- 
gress, they take another newspaper, and vote for 
another man. They must have money, for a cer- 
tain style of living fast becomes necessary ; they 
must take wine at the hotel, first, for the look of 
it, and second, for the purpose of sending the bottle 
to two or three gentlemen at the table ; and pres- 
ently because they have got the taste, and do not 
feel that they have dined without it. 

The record of the election now and then alarms 
people by the all but unanimous choice of a rogue 
and brawler. But how was it done ? What law- 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 27 

less mob burst into the polls and threw in these 
hundreds of ballots in defiance of the magistrates ? 
This was done by the very men you know, — the 
mildest, most sensible, best-natured people. The 
only account of this is, that they have been scared 
or warped into some association in their mind of 
the candidate with the interest of their trade or of 
their property. 

Whilst each cabal urges its candidate, and at 
last brings, with cheers and street-demonstrations, 
men whose names are a knell to all hope of prog- 
ress, the good and wise are hidden in their active 
retirements, and are quite out of question. 

" These we must join to wake, for these are of the strain 
That justice dare defend, and will the age maintain." 

Yet we know, all over this country, men of in- 
tegrity, capable of action and of affairs, with the 
deepest sympathy in all that concerns the public, 
mortified by the national disgrace, and quite car 
pable of any sacrifice except of their honor. 

Faults in the working appear in our system, as 
in all, but they suggest their own remedies. After 
every practical mistake out of which any disaster 
grows, the people wake and correct it with energy. 
And any disturbances in politics, in civil or foreign 
wars, sober them, and instantly show more virtue 



28 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

and conviction in the popular vote. In each new 
threat of faction the ballot has been, beyond expec- 
tation, right and decisive. 

It is ever an inspiration, God only knows whence ; 
a sudden, undated perception of eternal right com- 
ing into and correcting things that were wrong ; a 
perception that passes through thousands as readily 
as through one. 

The gracious lesson taught by science to this 
country is, that the history of nature from first to 
last is incessant advance from less to more, from 
rude to finer organization, the globe of matter thus 
conspiring with the principle of undying hope in 
man. Nature works in immense time, and spends 
individuals and races prodigally to prepare new 
individuals and races. The lower kinds are one af- 
ter one extinguished ; the higher forms come in. 
The history of civilization, or the refining of cer- 
tain races to wonderful power of performance, is 
analogous ; but the best civilization yet is only valu- 
able as a ground of hope. 

Ours is the country of poor men. Here is prac- 
tical democracy ; here is the human race poured 
out over the continent to do itself justice ; all man- 
kind in its shirt-sleeves ; not grimacing like poor 
rich men in cities, pretending to be rich, but un- 
mistakably taking off its coat to hard work, when 
labor is sure to pay. This through all the country. 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 29 

For really, though you see wealth in the capitals, 
it is only a sprinkling of rich men in the cities and 
at sparse points ; the bulk of the population is poor. 
In Maine, nearly every man is a lumberer. In 
Massachusetts, every twelfth man is a shoemaker, 
and the rest, millers, farmers, sailors, fishermen. 

Well, the result is, instead of the doleful experi- 
ence of the European economist, who tells us, " In 
almost all countries the condition of the great body 
of the people is poor and miserable," here that same 
great body has arrived at a sloven plenty, — ham 
and corn-cakes, tight roof and coals enough have 
been attained ; an unbuttoned comfort, not clean, 
not thoughtful, far from polished, without dignity 
in his repose ; the man awkward and restless if he 
have not something to do,' but honest and kind for 
the most part, understanding his own rights and 
stiff to maintain them, and disposed to give his 
children a better education than he received. 

The steady improvement of the public schools in 
the cities and the country enables the farmer or la- 
borer to secure a precious primary education. It is 
rare to find a born American who cannot read and 
write. The facility with which clubs are formed 
by young men for discussion of social, political and 
intellectual topics secures the notoriety of the ques* 
tions. 

Our institutions, of which the town is the unit, 



30 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

are all educational, for responsibility educates fast 
The town meeting is, after the high school, a higher 
school. The legislature, to which every good 
farmer goes once on trial, is a superior academy. 

The result appears in the power of invention, the 
freedom of thinking, in the readiness for reforms, 
eagerness for novelty, even for all the follies of 
false science ; in the antipathy to secret societies, 
in the predominance of the democratic party in 
the politics of the Union, and in the voice of the 
public even when irregular and vicious, — the voice 
of mobs, the voice of lynch law, — because it is 
thought to be, on the whole, the verdict, though 
badly spoken, of the greatest number. 

All this forwardness and self-reliance cover self- 
government ; proceed on the belief that as the peo- 
ple have made a government they can make an- 
other ; that their union and law are not in their 
memory, but in their blood and condition. If they 
unmake a law they can easily make a new one. In 
Mr. Webster's imagination the American Union 
was a huge Prince Rupert's drop, which will snap 
into atoms if so much as the smallest end be shiv- 
ered off. Now the fact is quite different from this. 
The people are loyal, law-abiding. They prefer 
order, and have no taste for misrule and uproar. 

America was opened after the feudal mischief 
was spent, and so the people made a good start 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 31 

We began well. No inquisition here, no kings, no 
nobles, no dominant church. Here heresy has lost 
its terrors. We have eight or ten religions in every 
large town, and the most that comes of it is a de- 
gree or two on the thermometer of fashion ; a pew 
in a particular church gives an easier entrance tG 
the subscription ball. 

We began with freedom, and are defended from 
shocks now for a century by the facility with which 
through popular assemblies every necessary meas- 
ure of reform can instantly be carried. A congress 
is a standing insurrection, and escapes the violence 
of accumulated grievance. As the globe keeps its 
identity by perpetual change, so our civil system, by 
perpetual appeal to the people and acceptance of 
its reforms. 

The government is acquainted with the opinions 
of all classes, knows the leading men in the mid- 
dle class, knows the leaders of the humblest class. 
The President comes near enough to these ; if he 
does not, the caucus does, the primary ward and 
town meeting, and what is important does reach 
him. 

The men, the women, all over this land shrill 
their exclamations of impatience and indignation 
at what is short-coming or is unbecoming in the 
government, — at the want of humanity, of moral- 
ity, — ever on broad grounds of general justice, and 



32 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

not on the class-feeling which narrows the percep* 
tion of English, French, German people at home. 

In this fact, that we are a nation of individuals, 
that we have a highly intellectual organization, that 
we can see and feel moral distinctions, and that on 
such an organization sooner or later the moral laws 
must tell, to such ears must speak, — in this is our 
hope. For if the prosperity of this country has 
"been merely the obedience of man to the guiding 
of nature, — of great rivers and prairies, — yet is 
there fate above fate, if we choose to speak this 
language ; or, if there is fate in corn and cotton, so 
is there fate in thought, — this, namely, that the 
largest thought and the widest love are born to 
victory, and must prevail. 

The revolution is the work of no man, but the 
eternal effervescence of nature. It never did not 
work. And we say that revolutions beat all the 
insurgents, be they never so determined and poli- 
tic ; that the great interests of mankind, being at 
every moment through ages in favor of justice and 
the largest liberty, will always, from time to time, 
gain on the adversary and at last win the day. 
Never country had such a fortune, as men call for- 
tune, as this, in its geography, its history, and in 
its majestic possibilities. 

We have much to learn, much to correct, — a 
great deal of lying vanity. The spread eagle must 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 33 

fold his foolish wings and be less of a peacock ; 
must keep his wings to carry the thunderbolt when 
he is commanded. We must realize our rhetoric 
and our rituals. Our national flag is not affecting, 
as it should be, because it does not represent the 
population of the United States, but some Balti- 
more or Chicago or Cincinnati or Philadelphia 
caucus ; not union or justice, but selfishness and 
cunning. If we never put on the liberty-cap until 
we were freemen by love and self-denial, the liberty- 
cap would mean something. I wish to see America 
not like the old powers of the earth, grasping, ex- 
clusive and narrow, but a benefactor such as no 
country ever was, hospitable to all nations, legislat- 
ing for all nationalities. Nations were made to 
help each other as much as families were ; and all 
advancement is by ideas, and not by brute force or 
mechanic force. 

In this country, with our practical understand- 
ing, there is, at present, a great sensualism, a head- 
long devotion to trade and to the conquest of the 
continent, — to each man as large a share of the 
same as he can carve for himself, — an extravagant 
confidence in our talent and activity, which be- 
comes, whilst successful, a scornful materialism, — 
but with the fault, of course, that it has no depth, 
no reserved force whereon to fall back when a re- 
verse comes. 



34 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

That repose which is the ornament and ripeness 
of man is not American. That repose which indi- 
cates a faith in the laws of the universe, — a faith 
that they will fulfil themselves, and are not to be 
impeded, transgressed, or accelerated. Our people 
are too slight and vain. They are easily elated and 
easily depressed. See how fast they extend the 
fleeting fabric of their trade, — not at all consider- 
ing the remote reaction and bankruptcy, but with 
the same abandonment to the moment and the facts 
of the hour as the Esquimaux who sells his bed in 
the morning. Our people act on the moment, and 
from external impulse. They all lean on some 
other, and this superstitiously, and not from insight 
of his merit. They follow a fact ; they follow suc- 
cess, and not skill. Therefore, as soon as the suc- 
cess stops and the admirable man blunders, they 
quit him ; already they remember that they long 
ago suspected his judgment, and they transfer the 
repute of judgment to the next prosperous person 
who has not yet blundered. Of course this levity 
makes them as easily despond. It seems as if his- 
tory gave no account of any society in which de- 
spondency came so readily to heart as we see it and 
feel it in ours. Young men at thirty and even 
earlier lose all spring and vivacity, and if they fail 
in their first enterprise throw up the game. 

The source of mischief is the extreme difficulty 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 35 

with which men are roused from the torpor of every 
day. Blessed is all that agitates the mass, breaks 
up this torpor, and begins motion. Corpora non 
aqunt nisi soluta ; 1 the chemical ride is true in 
mind. Contrast, change, interruption, are necessary 
' to new activity and new combinations. 

If a temperate wise man should look over our 
American society, I think the first danger that 
would excite his alarm would be the European in- 
fluences on this country. We buy much of Europe 
that does not make us better men : and mainly the 
expensiveness which is ruining that country. We 
import trifles, dancers, singers, laces, books of pat- 
terns, modes, gloves and cologne, manuals of Goth- 
ic architecture, steam-made ornaments America 
is provincial. It is an immense Halifax. See the 
secondariness and aping of foreign and English life, 
that runs through this country, in building, in dress, 
in eating, in books. Every village, every city has 
its architecture, its costume, its hotel, its private 
house, its church, from England. 

Our politics threaten her. Her manners threaten 
as. Life is grown and growing so costly that it 
threatens to kill us. A man is coming, here as 
there, to value himself on what he can buy. Worst 
of all, his expense is not his own, but a far-off copy 
of Osborne House or the Elyse*e. The tendency of 

1 fBodies do not move unless they are set free.] 



36 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

this is to make all men alike ; to extinguish individ- 
ualism and choke up all the channels of inspiration 
from God in man. We lose our invention and de- 
scend into imitation. A man no longer conducts 
his own life. It is manufactured for him. The 
tailor makes your dress ; the baker your bread ; the 
upholsterer, from an imported book of patterns, 
your furniture ; the Bishop of London your faith. 
In the planters of this country, in the seventeenth 
century, the conditions of the country, combined 
with the impatience of arbitrary power which they 
brought from England, forced them to a wonderful 
personal independence and to a certain heroic plant- 
ing and trading. Later this strength appeared in 
the solitudes of the West, where a man is made a 
hero by the varied emergencies of his lonely farm, 
and neighborhoods must combine against the In- 
dians, or the horse-thieves, or the river rowdies, by 
organizing themselves into committees of vigilance. 
Thus the land and sea educate the people, and bring 
out presence of mind, self-reliance, and hundred- 
handed activity. These are the people for an emer- 
gency. They are not to be surprised, and can find 
a way out of any peril. This rough and ready 
force becomes them, and makes them fit citizens 
and civilizers. But if we found them clinging to 
English traditions, which are graceful enough at 
home, as the English Church, and entailed estates, 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 37 

and distrust of popular election, we should feel this 
reactionary, and absurdly out of place. 

Let the passion for America cast out the passion 
for Europe. Here let there be what the earth 
waits for, — exalted manhood. What this country 
longs for is personalities, grand persons, to coun- 
teract its materialities. For it is the rule of the 
universe that corn shall serve man, and not man 
corn. 

They who find America insipid, — they for whom 
London and Paris have spoiled their own homes, 
can be spared to return to those cities. I not only 
see a career at home for more genius than we have, 
but for more than there is in the world. 

The class of which I speak make themselves 
merry without duties. They sit in decorated club- 
houses in the cities, and burn tobacco and play 
whist ; in the country they sit idle in stores and 
bar-rooms, and burn tobacco, and gossip and sleep. 
They complain of the flatness of American life; 
to America has no illusions, no romance." They 
have no perception of its destiny. They are not 
Americans. 

The felon is the logical extreme of the epicure 
and coxcomb. Selfish luxury is the end of both, 
though in one it is decorated with refinements, and 
in the other brutal. But my point now is, that 
this spirit is not American. 



38 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

Our young men lack idealism. A man for suc- 
cess must not be pure idealist, then lie will practi- 
cally fail ; but lie must have ideas, must obey ideas, 
or he might as well be the horse he rides on. A 
man does not want to be sun-dazzled, sun-blind ; 
but every man must have glimmer enough to keep 
him from knocking his head against the walls. 
And it is in the interest of civilization and good 
society and friendship, that I dread to hear of well- 
born, gifted and amiable men, that they have this 
indifference, disposing them to this despair. 

Of no use are the men who study to do exactly 
as was done before, who can never understand that 
to-day is a new day. There never was such a com- 
bination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are 
not set down in any history. We want men of 
original perception and original action, who can 
open their eyes wider than to a nationality, — 
namely, to considerations of benefit to the human 
race, — can act in the interest of civilization ; men 
of elastic, men of moral mind, who can live in the 
moment and take a step forward. Columbus was 
no backward-creeping crab, nor was Martin Luther, 
nor John Adams, nor Patrick Henry, nor Thomas 
Jefferson ; and the Genius or Destiny of America 
is no log or sluggard, but a man incessantly ad- 
vancing, as the shadow on the dial's face, or the 
heavenly body by whose light it is marked. 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 39 

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, 
the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of 
social power, — the gentleman. What hinders that 
he be born here ? The new times need a new man, 
the complemental man, whom plainly this country 
must furnish. Freer swing his arms ; farther 
pierce his eyes; more forward and forthright his 
whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who, 
we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone. 

'Tis certain that our civilization is yet incom- 
plete, it has not ended nor given sign of ending in 
a hero. 'T is a wild democracy ; the riot of medi- 
ocrities and dishonesties and fudges. Ours is the 
age of the omnibus, of the third person plural, of 
Tammany Hall. Is it that Nature has only so 
much vital force, and must dilute it if it is to be 
multiplied into millions? The beautiful is never 
plentiful. Then Illinois and Indiana, with their 
spawning loins, must needs be ordinary. 

It is not a question whether we shall be a multi- 
tude of people. No, that has been conspicuously 
decided already ; but whether we shall be the new 
nation, the guide and lawgiver of all nations, as 
having clearly chosen and firmly held the simplest 
and best rule of political society. 

Now, if the spirit which years ago armed this 
country against rebellion, and put forth such gi- 



40 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

gantic energy in the charity of the Sanitary Com- 
mission, could be waked to the conserving and cre- 
ating duty of making the laws just and humane, it 
were to enroll a great constituency of religious, 
self-respecting, brave, tender, faithful obeyers of 
duty, lovers of men, filled with loyalty to each other, 
and with the simple and sublime purpose of carry- 
ing out in private and in public action the desire 
and need of mankind. 

Here is the post where the patriot should plant 
himself ; here the altar where virtuous young men, 
those to whom friendship is the dearest covenant, 
should bind each other to loyalty; where genius 
should kindle its fires and bring forgotten truth to 
the eyes of men. 

It is not possible to extricate yourself from the 
questions in which your age is involved. Let the 
good citizen perform the duties put on him here 
and now. It is not by heads reverted to the dying 
Demosthenes, or to Luther, or to Wallace, or to 
George Fox, or to George Washington, that you 
can combat the dangers and dragons that beset the 
United States at this time. I believe this cannot 
be accomplished by dunces or idlers, but requires 
docility, sympathy, and religious receiving from 
higher principles ; for liberty, like religion, is a short 
and hasty fruit, and like all power subsists only by 
new rallyings on the source of inspiration. 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 41 

Power can be generous. The very grandeur of 
the means which offer themselves to us should sug- 
gest grandeur in the direction of our expenditure. 
If our mechanic arts are unsurpassed in usefulness, 
if we have taught the river to make shoes and nails 
and carpets, and the bolt of heaven to write our 
letters like a Gillott pen, let these wonders work 
for honest humanity, for the poor, for justice, gen- 
ius and the public good. Let us realize that this 
country, the last found, is the great charity of God 
to the human race. 

America should affirm and establish that in no 
instance shall the guns go in advance of the present 
right. We shall not make coups d'etat and after- 
wards explain and pay, but shall proceed like Wil- 
liam Penn, or whatever other Christian or humane 
person who treats with the Indian or the foreigner, 
on principles of honest trade and mutual advantage. 
We can see that the Constitution and the law in 
America must be written on ethical principles, so 
that the entire power of the spiritual world shall 
hold the citizen loyal, and repel the enemy as by 
force of nature. It should be mankind's bill of 
rights, or Royal Proclamation of the Intellect as- 
cending the throne, announcing its good pleasure 
that now, once for all, the world shall be governed 
by common sense and law of morals. 

The end of all political struggle is to establish 



42 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

morality as the basis of all legislation. 'T is not 
free institutions, 'tis not a democracy that is the 
end, — no, but only the means. Morality is the 
object of government. We want a state of things 
in which crime will not pay ; a state of things which 
allows every man the largest liberty compatible 
with the liberty of every other man. 

Humanity asks that government shall not be 
ashamed to be tender and paternal, but that dem- 
ocratic institutions shall be more thoughtful for the 
interests of women, for the training of children, 
and for the welfare of sick and unable persons, and 
serious care of criminals, than was ever any the 
best government of the Old World. 

The genius of the country has marked out our 
true policy, — opportunity. Opportunity of civil 
rights, of education, of personal power, and not less 
of wealth ; doors wide open. If I could have it, — 
free trade with all the world without toll or custom- 
houses, invitation as we now make to every nation, 
to every race and skin, white men, red men, yellow 
men, black men ; hospitality of fair field and equal 
laws to all. Let them compete, and success to the 
strongest, the wisest and the best. The land is 
wide enough, the soil has bread for all. 

I hope America will come to have its pride in 
being a nation of servants, and not of the served. 
How can men have any other ambition where 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 43 

the reason has not suffered a disastrous eclipse ? 
Whilst every man can say I serve, — to the whole 
extent of my being I apply my faculty to the service 
of mankind in my especial place, — he therein sees 
and shows a reason for his being in the world, and 
is not a moth or incumbrance in it. 

The distinction and end of a soundly constituted 
man is his labor. Use is inscribed on all his facul- 
ties. Use is the end to which he exists. As the 
tree exists for its fruit, so a man for his work. A 
fruitless plant, an idle animal, does not stand in 
the universe. They are all toiling, however secretly 
or slowly, in the province assigned them, and to a 
use in the economy of the world ; the higher and 
more complex organizations to higher and more 
catholic service. And man seems to play, by his 
instincts and activity, a certain part that even tells 
on the general face of the planet, drains swamps, 
leads rivers into dry countries for their irrigation, 
perforates forests and stony mountain-chains with 
roads, hinders the inroads of the sea on the conti- 
nent, as if dressing the globe for happier races. 

On the whole, I know that the cosmic results will 
be the same, whatever the daily events may be» 
Happily we are under better guidance than of 
statesmen. Pennsylvania coal mines, and New York 
shipping, and free labor, though not idealists, grav- 
itate in the ideal direction. Nothing less large than 



44 THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 

justice can keep them in good temper. Justice sat- 
isfies everybody, and justice alone. No monopoly 
must be foisted in, no weak party or nationality 
sacrificed, no coward compromise conceded to a 
strong partner. Every one of these is the seed of 
vice, war and national disorganization. It is our 
part to carry out to the last the ends of liberty and 
justice. We shall stand, then, for vast interests ; 
north and south, east and west will be present to 
our minds, and our vote will be as if they voted, 
and we shall know that our vote secures the foun- 
dations of the state, good-will, liberty and security 
of traffic and of production, and mutual increase of 
good-will in the great interests. 

Our helm is given up to a better guidance than 
our own ; the course of events is quite too strong 
for any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in 
tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows 
the way, and has the force to draw men and states 
and planets to their good. 

Such and so potent is this high method by which 
the Divine Providence sends the chiefest benefits 
under the mask of calamities, that I do not think 
we shall by any perverse ingenuity prevent the 
blessing. 

In seeing this guidance of events, in seeing this 
felicity without example that has rested on the 
Unio i thus far, I find new confidence for the future. 



THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC. 45 

I could heartily wish that our will and endeavor 
were more active parties to the work. But I see 
in all directions the light breaking. Trade and 
government will not alone be the favored aims of 
mankind, but every useful, every elegant art, every 
exercise of imagination, the height of reason, the 
noblest affection, the purest religion will find their 
home in our institutions, and write our laws for the 
benefit of men. 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 



Gentlemen : 

It is remarkable that our people have their intel- 
lectual culture from one country and their duties 
from another. This false state of things is newly in 
a way to be corrected. America is beginning to as- 
sert herself to the senses and to the imagination of 
her children, and Europe is receding in the same 
degree. This their reaction on education gives a 
new importance to the internal improvements and 
to the politics of the country. Who has not been 
stimulated to reflection by the facilities now in pro- 
gress of construction for travel and the transporta- 
tion of goods in the United States ? 

This rage of road building is beneficent for 
America, where vast distance is so main a consid- 
eration in our domestic politics and trade, inas- 
much as the great political promise of the inven- 
tion is to hold the Union staunch, whose days 
seemed already numbered by the mere inconven- 
ience of transporting representatives, judges, and 
officers across such tedious distances of land and 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 47 

water. Not only is distance annihilated, but when, 
as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like 
enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thou- 
sand various threads of national descent and em- 
ployment and bind them fast in one web, an hourly 
assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger 
that local peculiarities and hostilities should be pre- 
served. 

1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these 
improvements in creating an American sentiment. 
An unlooked for consequence of the railroad is the 
increased acquaintance it has given the American 
people with the boundless resources of their own 
soil. If this invention has reduced England to a 
third of its size, by bringing people so much nearer, 
in this country it has given a new celerity to time, 
or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts 
of land, the choice of water privileges, the working 
of mines, and other natural advantages. Railroad 
iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the 
sleeping energies of land and water. 

The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, 
though it has great value as a sort of yard-stick 
and surveyor's line. The bountiful continent is 
ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to 
the waves of the Pacific sea ; 

" Our garden is the immeasurable earth, 
The heaven's blue pillars are Medea's house." 



48 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

The task of surveying, planting, and building upon 
this immense tract requires an education and a 
sentiment commensurate thereto. A consciousness 
of this fact is beginning to take the place of the 
purely trading spirit and education which sprang 
up whilst all the population lived on the fringe of 
sea-coast. And even on the coast, prudent men 
have begun to see that every American should be 
educated with a view to the values of land. The 
arts of engineering and of architecture are studied ; 
scientific agriculture is an object of growing atten- 
tion ; the mineral riches are explored ; limestone, 
coal, slate, and iron ; and the value of timber-lands 
is enhanced. 

Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a con- 
tinent in the West, that the harmony of nature re- 
quired a great tract of land in the western hemi- 
sphere, to balance the known extent of land in the 
eastern ; and it now appears that we must estimate 
the native values of this broad region to redress the 
balance of our own judgments, and appreciate the 
advantages opened to the human race in this coun- 
try which is our fortunate home. The land is the 
appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantas- 
tic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to 
be physic and food for our mind, as well as our 
body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative 
influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 49 

traditional education, and bring us into just rela- 
tions with men and things. 

The habit of living in the presence of these in- 
vitations of natural wealth is not inoperative ; and 
this habit, combined with the moral sentiment 
which, in the recent years, has interrogated « very- 
institution, usage, and law, has naturally given a 
strong direction to the wishes and aims of active 
young men, to withdraw from cities and cultivate 
the soil. This inclination has appeared in the most 
unlooked for quarters, in men supposed to be ab- 
sorbed in business, and in those connected with the 
liberal professions. And since the walks of trade 
were crowded, whilst that of agriculture cannot 
easily be, inasmuch as the farmer who is not wanted 
by others can yet grow his own bread, whilst the 
manufacturer or the trader, who is not wanted, can- 
not, — this seemed a happy tendency. For beside 
all the moral benefit which we may expect from the 
farmer's profession, when a man enters it consid- 
erately ; this promised the conquering of the soil, 
plenty, and beyond this the adorning of the country 
with every advantage and ornament which labor, 
ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could 
suggest. 

Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific dis- 
position of the people, everything invites to the arts 
of agriculture, of gardening, and domestic archi. 



50 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

tecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plan- 
tations in Europe and Asia, are now unknown to 
us. There is no feature of the old countries that 
strikes an American with more agreeable surprise 
than the beautiful gardens of Europe ; such as the 
Boboli in Florence, the Villa Borghese in Rome, 
the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, the gardens at Munich 
and at Frankfort on the Main : works easily imi- 
tated here, and which might well make the land 
dear to the citizen, and inflame patriotism. It is 
the fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture, 
painting, and religious and civil architecture have 
become effete, and have passed into second child- 
hood. We have twenty degrees of latitude wherein 
to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling 
enlarge the opportunity of selection, by making it 
easy to cultivate very distant tracts and yet remain 
in strict intercourse with the centres of trade and 
population. And the whole force of all the arts 
goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwell- 
ings. A garden has this advantage, that it makes 
it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden 
makes the face of the country of no account ; let 
that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made 
a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the land- 
scape is pleasing, the garden shows it, — if tame, 
it excludes it. A little grove, which any farmei 
can find or cause to grow near his house, will in a 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 51 

few years make cataracts and chains of mountains 
quite unnecessary to his scenery ; and he is so con- 
tented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards and 
river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White 
Hills, and Nantasket Beach, are superfluities. And 
yet the selection of a fit houselot has the same 
advantage over an indifferent one, as the selection 
to a given employment of a man who has a genius 
for that work. In the last case the culture of 
years will never make the most painstaking ap- 
prentice his equal: no more will gardening give 
the advantage of a happy site to a house in a hole 
or on a pinnacle. In America we have hitherto 
little to boast in this kind. The cities drain the 
country of the best part of its population : the 
flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the 
towns, and the country is cultivated by a so much 
inferior class. The land, — travel a whole day to- 
gether, — looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings 
plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an 
aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of the 
best stock and the best culture, whose interest and 
pride it is to remain half the year on their estates, 
and to fill them with every convenience and orna- 
ment. Of course these make model farms, and 
model architecture, and are a constant education to 
the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever 
events in progress shall go to disgust men with 



52 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

cities and infuse into them the passion for country 
life and country pleasures, will render a service to 
the whole face of this continent, and will further 
the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, 
the bringing out by art the native but hidden 
graces of the landscape. 

I look on such improvements also as directly 
tending to endear the land to the inhabitant. Any 
relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or min- 
ing it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling 
of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who 
merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, 
or to his manufactory, values it less. The vast 
majority of the people of this country live by the 
land, and carry its quality in their manners and 
opinions. We in the Atlantic states, by position, 
have been commercial, and have, as I said, imbibed 
easily an European culture. Luckily for us, now 
that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, 
the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and 
continental element into the national mind, and we 
shall yet have an American genius. How much 
better when the whole land is a garden, and the 
people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise. 
Without looking then to those extraordinary social 
influences which are now acting in precisely this 
direction, but only at what is inevitably doing 
around us, I think we must regard the land as a 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 53 

commanding and increasing power on the citizen, 
the sanative and Americanizing influence, which 
promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come. 

2. In the second place, the uprise and culmina- 
tion of the new and anti-feudal power of Com- 
merce is the political fact of most significance to 
the American at this hour. 

We cannot look on the freedom of this country, 
in connexion with its youth, without a presentiment 
that here shall laws and institutions exist on some 
scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To 
men legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans, 
betwixt the snows and the tropics, somewhat of the 
gravity of nature will infuse itself into the code. 
A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships 
from all corners of the world to the great gates of 
North America, namely Boston, New York, and 
New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the 
prairie and the mountains, and quickly contribut- 
ing their private thought to the public opinion, 
their toll to the treasury, and their vote to the elec- 
tion, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of 
this country should become more catholic and cos- 
mopolitan than that of any other. It seems so 
easy for America to inspire and express the most 
expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, health- 
ful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, 
of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, 



54 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

she should speak for the human race. It is the 
country of the Future. From Washington, prover- 
bially ' the city of magnificent distances,' through 
all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country 
of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expecta- 
tions. 

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Des- 
tiny by which the human race is guided, — the 
race never dying, the individual never spared, — 
to results affecting masses and ages. Men are nar- 
row and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not 
narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in 
their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what 
befalls, with or without their design. Only what 
is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love 
and good are inevitable, and in the course of 
things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. 
It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small 
balance in brute facts always favorable to the side 
of reason. All the facts in any part of nature 
shall be tabulated and the results shall indicate 
the same security and benefit ; so slight as to be 
hardly observable, and yet it is there. The sphere 
is flattened at the poles and swelled at the equa- 
tor ; a form flowing necessarily from the fluid state, 
yet the form, the mathematician assures us, re- 
quired to prevent the protuberances of the conti- 
nent, or even of lesser mountains cast up at any 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 55 

time by earthquakes, from continually deranging 
the axis of the earth. The census of the popula- 
tion is found to keep an invariable equality in the 
sexes, with a trifling predominance in favor of the 
male, as if to counterbalance the necessarily in- 
creased exposure of male life in war, navigation, 
and other accidents. Remark the unceasing effort 
throughout nature at somewhat better than the ac- 
tual creatures : amelioration in nature, which alone 
permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. 
The population of the world is a conditional popu- 
lation ; these are not the best, but the best that 
could live in the existing state of soils, gases, ani- 
mals and morals : the best that could yet live ; 
there shall be a better, please God. This Genius 
or Destiny is of the sternest administration, though 
rumors exist of its secret tenderness. It may be 
styled a cruel kindness, serving the whole even to 
the ruin of the member ; a terrible communist, re- 
serving all profits to the community, without divi- 
dend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have 
everything as a member, nothing to yourself. For 
Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding 
economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into 
to-morrow's creation ; — not a superfluous grain of 
sand, for all the ostentation she makes of expense 
and public works. It is because Nature thus saves 
and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor 



56 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

particulars are so crushed and straitened, and find 
it so hard to live. She flung us out in her plenty, 
but we cannot shed a hair or a paring of a nail but 
instantly she snatches at the shred and appropriates 
it to the general stock. Our condition is like that 
of the poor wolves : if one of the flock wound him- 
self or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incon- 
tinently. 

That serene Power interposes the check upon 
the caprices and officiousness of our wills. Its 
charity is not our charity. One of its agents is 
our will, but that which expresses itself in our will 
is stronger than our will. We are very forward to 
help it, but it will not be accelerated. It resists 
our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances. We de- 
vise sumptuary and relief laws, but the principle 
of population is always reducing wages to the low- 
est pittance on which human life can be sustained. 
We legislate against forestalling and monopoly ; 
we would have a common granary for the poor ; 
but the selfishness which hoards the corn for high 
prices is the preventive of famine ; and the law of 
self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation 
can be. We concoct eleemosynary systems, and 
it turns out that our charity increases pauperism. 
We inflate our paper currency, we repair commerce 
with unlimited credit, and are presently visited 
with unlimited bankruptcy. 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 57 

It is easy to see that the existing generation are 
conspiring with a beneficence which in its working 
for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one ; 
which infatuates the most selfish men to act against 
their private interest for the public welfare. We 
build railroads, we know not for what or for whom ; 
but one thing is certain, that we who build will re- 
ceive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit 
will accrue, they are essential to the country, but 
that will be felt not until we are no longer country- 
men. We do the like in all matters : — 

" Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set 
By secret and inviolable springs." 

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem 
the waste, we make prospective laws, we found col- 
leges and hospitals, for remote generations. We 
should be mortified to learn that the little benefit 
we chanced in our own persons to receive was the 
utmost they would yield. 

The history of commerce is the record of this 
beneficent tendency. The patriarchal form of gov- 
ernment readily becomes despotic, as each person 
may see in his own family. Fathers wish to be 
fathers of the minds of their children, and behold 
with impatience a new character and way of think- 
ing presuming to show itself in their own son or 
daughter. This feeling, which all their love and 
pride in the powers of their children cannot suh 



58 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

due, becomes petulance and tyranny when the head 
of the clan, the emperor of an empire, deals with 
the same difference of opinion in his subjects. 
Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings 
never forgive. An empire is an immense egotism. 
" I am the State," said the French Louis. When 
a French ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia 
that a man of consequence in St. Petersburg was 
interesting himself in some matter, the Czar inter- 
rupted him, — " There is no man of consequence 
in this empire but he with whom 1 am actually 
speaking ; and so long only as I am speaking to 
him is he of any consequence." And the Emperor 
Nicholas is reported to have said to his council, 
" The age is embarrassed with new opinions ; rely 
on me gentlemen, I shall oppose an iron will to 
the progress of liberal opinions." 

It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family 
management gets to be rather troublesome to all 
but the papa ; the sceptre comes to be a crow-bar. 
And this unpleasant egotism, Feudalism opposes 
and finally destroys. The king is compelled to call 
in the aid of his brothers and cousins and remote 
relations, to help him keep his overgrown house in 
order ; and this club of noblemen always come at 
last to have a will of their own ; they combine to 
brave the sovereign, and call in the aid of the peo- 
ple. Each chief attaches as many followers as lie 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 59 

can, by kindness, maintenance, and gifts ; and as 
long as war lasts, the nobles, who must be soldiers, 
rule very well. But when peace comes, the nobles 
prove very whimsical and uncomfortable masters ; 
their frolics turn out to be insulting and degrading 
to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a bandit 
and brigand. 

Meantime Trade had begun to appear : Trade, a 
plant which grows wherever there is peace, as soon 
as there is peace, and as long as there is peace. 
The luxury and necessity of the noble fostered it. 
And as quickly as men go to foreign parts in ships 
or caravans, a new order of things springs up ; new 
command takes place, new servants and new mas- 
ters. Their information, their wealth, their corre- 
spondence, have made them quite other men than 
left their native shore. They are nobles now, and 
by another patent than the king's. Feudalism 
had been good, had broken the power of the kings, 
and had some good traits of its own ; but it had 
grown mischievous, it was time for it to die, and as 
they say of dying people, all its faults came out. 
Trade was the strong man that broke it down and 
raised a new and unknown power in its place. It 
is a new agent in the world, and one of great func- 
tion ; it is a very intellectual force. This displaces 
physical strength and instals computation, combin- 
ation, information, science, in its room. It calls 



60 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

out all force of a certain kind that slumbered in 
the former dynasties. It is now in the midst of 
its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our gov- 
ernments still partake largely of that element. 
Trade goes to make the governments insignificant, 
and to bring every kind of faculty of every individ- 
ual that can in any manner serve any person, on 
sale. Instead of a huge Army and Navy and Ex- 
ecutive Departments, it converts Government into 
an Intelligence-Office, where every man may find 
what he wishes to buy, and expose what he has to 
sell ; not only produce and manufactures, but art, 
skill, and intellectual and moral values. This is 
the good and this the evil of trade, that it would 
put everything into market ; talent, beauty, virtue, 
and man himself. 

The philosopher and lover of man have much 
harm to say of trade ; but the historian will see 
that trade was the principle of Liberty ; that trade 
planted America and destroyed Feudalism ; that 
*t makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish 
slavery. We complain of its oppression of the 
poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on 
the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But the 
aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not en- 
tailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result 
of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, 
like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 61 

same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of 
that friendly Power which works for us in our own 
despite. We design it thus and thus ; it turns out 
otherwise and far better. This beneficent tenden- 
cy, omnipotent without violence, exists and works, 
Every line of history inspires a confidence that we 
shall not go far wrong ; that things mend. That is 
the moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope, 
the prolific mother of reforms. Our part is plainly 
not to throw ourselves across the track, to block 
improvement and sit till we are stone, but to watch 
the uprise of successive mornings and to conspire 
with the new works of new days. Government has 
been a fossil ; it should be a plant. I conceive that 
the office of statute law should be to express and 
not to impede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, 
new things. Trade was one instrument, but Trade 
is also but for a time, and must give way to some- 
what broader and better, whose signs are already 
dawning in the sky. 

3. I pass to speak of the signs of that which is 
the sequel of trade. 

In consequence of the revolution in the state of 
society wrought by trade, Government in our times 
is beginning to wear a clumsy and cumbrous ap- 
pearance. We have already seen our way to 
shorter methods. The time is full of good signs. 
Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All this bene* 



62 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

ficent socialism is a friendly omen, and the swelling 
cry of voices for the education of the people indi- 
cates that Government has other offices than those 
of banker and executioner. Witness the new move- 
ments in the civilized world, the Communism of 
France, Germany, and Switzerland; the Trades' 
Unions ; the English League against the Corn Laws ; 
and the whole Industrial Statistics, so called. In 
Paris, the blouse, the badge of the operative, has 
begun to make its appearance in the saloons. Wit- 
ness too the spectacle of three Communities which 
have within a very short time sprung up within 
this Commonwealth, besides several others under- 
taken by citizens of Massachusetts within the ter- 
ritory of other States. These proceeded from a 
variety of motives, from an impatience of many 
usages in common life, from a wish for greater free- 
dom than the manners and opinions of society per- 
mitted, but in great part from a feeling that the 
true offices of the State, the State had let fall to the 
ground ; that in the scramble of parties for the 
public purse, the main duties of government were 
omitted, — the duty to instruct the ignorant, to 
supply the poor with work and with good guidance. 
These communists preferred the agricultural life as 
the most favorable condition for human culture ; 
but they thought that the farm, as we manage it, 
did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 63 

farmer, after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, 
thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bank- 
rupt, like the merchant. This result might well 
seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cock-crow- 
ing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mort- 
gages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from 
bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked 
into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is 
the fool. It seemed a great deal worse, because the 
farmer is living in the same town with men who 
pretend to know exactly what he wants. On one 
side is agricultural chemistry, coolly exposing the 
nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture and ruin- 
ous expense of manures, and offering, by means of 
a teaspoonf ul of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank 
into corn ; and on the other, the farmer, not only 
eager for the information, but with bad crops and 
in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here are 
Etzlers and mechanical projectors, who, with the 
Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the smallest 
union would make every man rich ; — and, on the 
other side, a multitude of poor men and women 
seeking work, and who cannot find enough to pay 
their board. The science is confident, and surely 
the poverty is real. If any means could be found 
to bring these two together ! 

This was one design of the projectors of the As- 
sociations which are now making their first feeble 



64 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

experiments. They were founded in love and in 
labor. They proposed, as you know, that all men 
should take a part in the manual toil, and proposed 
to amend the condition of men by substituting har- 
monious for hostile industry. It was a noble thought 
of Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his sys- 
tem, to distinguish in his Phalanx a class as the 
Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were dis- 
agreeable and likely to be omitted, were to be as- 
sumed. 

At least an economical success seemed certain for 
the enterprise, and that agricultural association 
must, sooner or later, fix the price of bread, and 
drive single farmers into association in self-defence ; 
as the great commercial and manufacturing com- 
panies had already done. The Community is 
only the continuation of the same movement which 
made the joint-stock companies for manufactures, 
mining, insurance, banking, and so forth. It has 
turned out cheaper to make calico by companies ; 
and it is proposed to plant corn and to bake bread 
by companies. 

Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made 
by these first adventurers, which will draw ridicule 
on their schemes. I think for example that they 
exaggerate the importance of a favorite project of 
theirs, that of paying talent and labor at one rate, 
paying all sorts of service at one rate, say ten cents 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 65 

the hour. They have paid it so; but not an in- 
stant would a dime remain a dime. In one hand 
it became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a 
copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in 
knowing what to do with it. One man buys with 
it a land-title of an Indian, and makes his posterity 
princes ; or buys corn enough to feed the world ; 
or pen, ink, and paper, or a painter's brush, by 
which he can communicate himself to the human 
race as if he were fire ; and the other buys barley 
candy. Money is of no value ; it cannot spend it- 
self. All depends on the skill of the spender. 
Whether too the objection almost universally felt 
by such women in the community as were mothers, to 
an associate life, to a common table, and a common 
nursery, etc., setting a higher value on the private 
family, with poverty, than on an association with 
wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be 
determined. 

But the Communities aimed at a higher success 
in securing to all their members an equal and 
thorough education. And on the whole one may 
say that aims so generous and so forced on them 
by the times, will not be relinquished, even if these at- 
tempts fail, but will be prosecuted until they succeed. 

This is the value of the Communities ; not what 
they have done, but the revolution which they in' 
dicate as on the way. Yes, Government must edu- 



66 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

cate the poor man. Look across the country from 
any hill -side around us and the landscape seems 
to crave Government. The actual differences of 
men must be acknowledged, and met with love and 
wisdom. These rising grounds which command 
the champaign below, seem to ask for lords, true 
lords, Ztm^-lords, who understand the land and its 
uses and the applicabilities of men, and whose 
government would be what it should, namely me- 
diation between want and supply. How gladly 
would each citizen pay a commission for the sup- 
port and continuation of good guidance. None 
should be a governor who has not a talent for 
governing. Now many people have a native skill 
for carving out business for many hands ; a genius 
for the disposition of affairs ; and are never hap- 
pier than when difficult practical questions, which 
embarrass other men, are to be solved. All lies 
in light before them ; they are in their element. 
Could any means be contrived to appoint only 
these ! There really seems a progress towards 
such a state of things in which this work shall be 
done by these natural workmen ; and this, not cer* 
tainly through any increased discretion shown by 
the citizens at elections, but by the gradual com 
'tempt into which official government falls, and the 
increasing disposition of private adventurers to as« 
sume its fallen functions. Thus the national Post 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 67 

Office is likely to go into disuse before the private 
telegraph and the express companies. The cur- 
rency threatens to fall entirely into private hands. 
Justice is continually administered more and more 
by private reference, and not by litigation. We 
have feudal governments in a commercial age. It 
would be but an easy extension of our commercial 
system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, 
as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. 
If any man has a talent for righting wrong, for ad- 
ministering difficult affairs, for counselling poor 
farmers how to turn their estates to good husband- 
ry, for combining a hundred private enterprises 
to a general benefit, let him in the county-town, or 
in Court Street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, 
Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king. 

How can our young men complain of the pov- 
erty of things in New England, and not feel that 
poverty as a demand on their charity to make New 
England rich ? Where is he who seeing a thou- 
sand men useless and unhappy, and making the 
whole region forlorn by their inaction, and con- 
scious himself of possessing the faculty they want, 
does not hear his call to go and be their king? 

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. 
Nature provides such in every society, — only let 
us have the real instead of the titular. Let us 
have our leading and our inspiration from the best. 



68 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

In every society some men are born to rule and 
some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, 
directed by love, and they would everywhere be 
greeted with joy and honor. The chief is the chief 
all the world over, only not his cap and his plume. 
It is only their dislike of the pretender, which 
makes men sometimes unjust to the accomplished 
man. If society were transparent, the noble would 
everywhere be gladly received and accredited, and 
would not be asked for his day's work, but would 
be felt as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That 
were his duty and stint, — to keep himself pure 
and purifying, the leaven of his nation. I think I 
see place and duties for a nobleman in every soci- 
ety ; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine 
coach, but to guide and adorn life for the multi- 
tude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perse- 
verance, self-devotion, and the remembrance of the 
humble old friend, by making his life secretly beau- 
tiful. 

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart 
and be the nobility of this land. In every age of 
the world there has been a leading nation, one of 
a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens 
were willing to stand for the interests of general 
justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, 
by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantas- 
tic. Which should be that nation but these States? 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 69 

Which should lead that movement, if not New Eng- 
land ? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young 
American ? The people, and the world, are now 
suffering from the want of religion and honor in 
its public mind. In America, out-of-doors all 
seems a market ; in-doors an air-tight stove of con- 
ventionalism. Every body who comes into our 
houses savors of these habits ; the men, of the mar- 
ket ; the women, of the custom. I find no expres- 
sion in our state papers or legislative debate, in our 
lyceums or churches, especially in our newspapers, 
of a high national feeling, no lofty counsels that 
rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs 
which can be presumed to speak a popular sense. 
They recommend conventional virtues, whatever 
will earn and preserve property; always the capi- 
talist ; the college, the church, the hospital, the 
theatre, the hotel, the road, the ship, of the capital- 
ist, — whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these 
is good; what jeopardizes any of these is damna- 
ble. The ' opposition ' papers, so called, are on the 
same side. They attack the great capitalist, but 
with the aim to make a capitalist of the poor man. 
The opposition is against those who have money, 
from those who wish to have money. But who an- 
nounces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the 
street, the secret of heroism ? 

" Man alone 
Can perform the impossible." 



70 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

I shall not need to go into an enumeration of 
our national defects and vices which require this 
Order of Censors in the State. I might not set 
down our most proclaimed offences as the worst. 
It is not often the worst trait that occasions the 
loudest outcry. Men complain of their suffering, 
and not of the crime. I fear little from the bad 
effect of Repudiation; I do not fear that it will 
spread. Stealing is a suicidal business ; you can- 
not repudiate but once. But the bold face and 
tardy repentance permitted to this local mischief 
reveal a public mind so preoccupied with the love 
of gain that the common sentiment of indignation 
at fraud does not act with its natural force. The 
more need of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a 
resort to the fountain of right, by the brave. The 
timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, 
shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence 
of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful, but we 
want justice, with heart of steel, to fight down the 
proud. The private mind has the access to the to- 
tality of goodness and truth that it may be a bal- 
ance to a corrupt society ; and to stand for the pri- 
vate verdict against popular clamor is the office of 
the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in 
behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the 
Catholic, or for the succor of the poor ; that senti- 
ment, that project, will have the homage of the 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 71 

hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, 
to succor the helpless and oppressed ; always to 
throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of 
hope ; on the liberal, on the expansive side, never 
on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the 
lock-and-bolt system. More than our good-will we 
may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, 
our own genius, which chains each to his proper 
work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the 
debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is 
doing ; but to one thing we are bound, not to blas- 
pheme the sentiment and the work of that man, not 
to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the aboli- 
tionist, the philanthropist ; as the organs of influence 
and opinion are swift to do. It is for us to confide 
in the beneficent Supreme Power, and not to rely 
on our money, and on the state because it is the 
guard of money. At this moment, the terror of old 
people and of vicious people is lest the Union of 
these states be destroyed : as if the Union had any 
other real basis than the good pleasure of a major- 
ity of the citizens to be united. But the wise and 
just man will always feel that he stands on his own 
feet ; that he imparts strength to the State, not re- 
ceives security from it ; and that if all went down, 
he and such as he would quite easily combine in a 
new and better constitution. Every great and 
memorable community has consisted of formidable 



72 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

individuals, who, like the Roman or the Spartan, 
lent his own spirit to the State and made it great. 
Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong ; noth= 
ing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier 
than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before 
which the State and the individual are alike ephem- 
eral. 

Gentlemen, the development of our American 
internal resources, the extension to the utmost of 
the commercial system, and the appearance of new 
moral causes which are to modify the State, are 
giving an aspect of greatness to the Future, which 
the imagination fears to open. One thing is plain 
for all men of common sense and common con- 
science, that here, here in America, is the home of 
man. After all the deductions which are to be 
made for our pitiful politics, which stake every 
gravest national question on the silly die whether 
James or whether Robert shall sit in the chair and 
hold the purse ; after all the deduction is made for 
our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an 
organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses 
its balance, redresses itself presently, which offers 
opportunity to the human mind not known in any 
other region. 

It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. 
We are full of vanity, of which the most signal 
proof is our sensitiveness to foreign and especially 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 73 

English censure. One cause of this is our immense 
reading, and that reading chiefly confined to the 
productions of the English press. It is also true 
that to imaginative persons in this country there 
is somewhat bare and bald in our short history and 
unsettled wilderness. They ask, who would live 
in a new country that can live in an old ? and it is 
not strange that our youths and maidens should 
burn to see the picturesque extremes of an anti- 
quated country. But it is one thing to visit the 
Pyramids, and another to wish to live there. 
Would they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths 
to the government, and Horse-Guards, and licensed 
press, and grief when a child is born, and threaten- 
ing, starved weavers, and a pauperism now consti- 
tuting one thirteenth of the population ? Instead 
of the open future expanding here before the eye 
of every boy to vastness, would they like the clos- 
ing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and 
that fast contracting to be no future ? One thing 
for instance, the beauties of aristocracy, we com- 
mend to the study of the travelling American. 
The English, the most conservative people this side 
of India, are not sensible of the restraint, but an 
American would seriously resent it. The aristoc- 
racy, incorporated by law and education, degrades 
life for the unprivileged classes. It is a question- 
able compensation to the embittered feeling of a 



74 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 

proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who, by 
the magic of title, paralyzes his arm and plucks 
from him half the graces and rights of a man, is 
himself also an aspirant excluded with the same 
ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no 
end to the wheels within wheels of this spiral hea- 
ven. Something may be pardoned to the spirit of 
loyalty when it becomes fantastic ; and something 
to the imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. 
Philip II. of Spain rated his ambassador for neg- 
lecting serious affairs in Italy, whilst he debated 
some point of honor with the French ambassador ; 
" You have left a business of importance for a cer- 
emony." The ambassador replied, "Your Maj- 
esty's self is but a ceremony." In the East, where 
the religious sentiment comes in to the support of 
the aristocracy, and in the Romish church also, 
there is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny ; but 
in England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what 
is commonly affirmed, that such is the transcendent 
honor accorded to wealth and birth, that no man 
of letters, be his eminence what it may, is received 
into the best society, except as a lion and a show. 
The English have many virtues, many advantages, 
and the proudest history of the world ; but they 
need all and more than all the resources of the 
past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that coun- 
try for the mortifications prepared for him by the 



THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 75 

system of society, and which seem to impose the 
alternative to resist or to avoid it. That there are 
mitigations and practical alleviations to this rigor, 
is not an excuse for the rule. Commanding worth 
and personal power must sit crowned in all compa- 
nies, nor will extraordinary persons be slighted or 
affronted in any company of civilized men. But 
the system is an invasion of the sentiment of jus, 
tice and the native rights of men, which, however 
decorated, must lessen the value of English citizen- 
ship. It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us ; 
we only say, Let us live in America, too thankful 
for our want of feudal institutions. Our houses 
and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight 
and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall 
daily mend. This land too is as old as the Flood, 
and wants no ornament or privilege which nature 
could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills, 
here animals, here men abound, and the vast ten- 
dencies concur of a new order. If only the men 
are employed in conspiring with the designs of the 
Spirit who led us hither and is leading us still, we 
shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of 
others' censures, out of all regrets of our own, into 
a new and more excellent social state than history 
has recorded. 



AMEEICAN CIVILIZATION.! 



Use, labor of each for all, is the health and vir- 
tue of all beings. Ich die?i, I serve, is a truly royal 
motto. And it is the mark of nobleness to volun- 
teer the lowest service, the greatest spirit only at- 
taining to humility. Nay, God is God because he is 
the servant of all. Well, now here comes this con- 
spiracy of slavery, — they call it an institution, I 
call it a destitution, — this stealing of men and set- 
ting them to work, stealing their labor, and the thief 
sitting idle himself ; and for two or three ages it 
has lasted, and has yielded a certain quantity of rice, 
cotton and sugar. And, standing on this doleful 
experience, these people have endeavored to reverse 
the natural sentiments of mankind, and to pronounce 
labor disgraceful, and the well-being of a man to 
consist in eating the fruit of other men's labor. 

1 Part of a lecture delivered at Washington, Jan. 31, 1862, 
it is said, in the presence of President Lincoln and some of 
his Cabinet, some months before the issuing of the Emancipa- 
tion Proclamation. The rest was published in Society and 
Solitude, under the title " Civilization." 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 77 

Labor : a man coins himself into his labor ; turns 
his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into 
some product which remains as the visible sign of 
his power ; and to protect that, to secure that to 
him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the 
object of all government. There is no interest in 
any country so imperative as that of labor ; it cov- 
ers all, and constitutions and governments exist for 
that, — to protect and insure it to the laborer. 
All honest men are daily striving to earn their 
bread by their industry. And who is this who 
tosses his empty head at this blessing in disguise, 
the constitution of human nature, and calls labor 
vile, and insults the faithful workman at his daily 
toil ? I see for such madness no hellebore, — for 
such calamity no solution but servile war and the 
Africanization of the country that permits it. 

At this moment in America the aspects of politi- 
cal society absorb attention. In every house, from 
Canada to the Gulf, the children ask the serious 
father, — " What is the news of the war to-day, 
and when will there be better times ? " The boys 
have no new clothes, no gifts, no journeys ; the 
girls must go without new bonnets ; boys and girls 
find their education, this year, less liberal and com- 
plete. All the little hopes that heretofore made 
the year pleasant are deferred. The state of the 
country fills us with anxiety and stern duties. We 



78 AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 

have attempted to hold together two states of civi- 
lization : a higher state, where labor and the tenure 
of land and the right of suffrage are democratical ; 
and a lower state, in which the old military tenure 
of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a 
few hands, makes an oligarchy : we have attempted 
to hold these two states of society under one law. 
But the rude and early state of society does not 
work well with the later, nay, works badly, and has 
poisoned politics, public morals and social inter- 
course in the Republic, now for many years. 

The times put this question, Why cannot the 
best civilization be extended over the whole country, 
since the disorder of the less-civilized portion men- 
aces the existence of the country ? Is this secular 
progress we have described, this evolution of man 
to the highest powers, only to give him sensibility, 
and not to bring duties with it ? Is he not to make 
his knowledge practical ? to stand and to withstand ? 
Is not civilization heroic also ? Is it not for ac- 
tion ? has it not a will ? " There are periods," 
said Niebuhr, " when something much better than 
happiness and security of life is attainable." We 
live in a new and exceptional age. America is 
another word for Opportunity. Our whole history 
appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence 
in behalf of the human race ; and a literal, slavish 
following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 79 

is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies 
of this people. The evil you contend with has taken 
alarming proportions, and you still content yourself 
with parrying the blows it aims, but, as if enchanted, 
abstain from striking at the cause. 

If the American people hesitate, it is not for 
want of warning or advices. The telegraph has 
been swift enough to announce our disasters. The 
journals have not suppressed the extent of the ca- 
lamity. Neither was there any want of argument 
or of experience. If the war brought any surprise 
to the North, it was not the fault of sentinels on 
the watch-tower, who had furnished full details of 
the designs, the muster and the means of the enemy. 
Neither was anything concealed of the theory or 
practice of slavery. To what purpose make more 
big books of these statistics ? There are already 
mountains of facts, if any one wants them. But 
people do not want them. They bring their opin- 
ion into the world. If they have a comatose ten- 
dency in the brain, they are pro-slavery while they 
live ; if of a nervous sanguineous temperament, 
they are abolitionists. Then interests were never 
persuaded. Can you convince the shoe interest, or 
the iron interest, or the cotton interest, by reading 
passages from Milton or Montesquieu ? You wish 
to satisfy people that slavery is bad economy. 
Why, the "Edinburgh Review" pounded on that 



80 AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 

string, and made out its case, forty years ago. A 
democratic statesman said to me, long since, that, 
if he owned the State of Kentucky, he would manu- 
mit all the slaves, and be a gainer by the transac- 
tion. Is this new ? No, everybody knows it. As 
a general economy it is admitted. But there is no 
one owner of the state, but a good many small own- 
ers. One man owns land and slaves ; another 
owns slaves only. Here is a woman who has no 
other property, — like a lady in Charleston I knew 
of, who owned fifteen sweeps and rode in her car- 
riage. It is clearly a vast inconvenience to each of 
these to make any change, and they are fretful and 
talkative, and all their friends are ; and those less 
interested are inert, and, from want of thought, 
averse to innovation. It is like free trade, certainly 
the interest of nations, but by no means the inter- 
est of certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds 
fat ; and the eager interest of the few overpowers 
the apathetic general conviction of the many. 
Banknotes rob the public, but are such a daily con- 
venience that we silence our scruples and make be- 
lieve they are gold. So imposts are the cheap and 
right taxation ; but, by the dislike of people to pay 
out a direct tax, governments are forced to render 
life costly by making them pay twice as much, hid- 
den in the price of tea and sugar. 

In this national crisis, it is not argument that we 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 81 

want, but that rare courage which dares commit it- 
self to a principle, believing that Nature is its ally, 
and will create the instruments it requires, and 
more than make good any petty and injurious pro- 
fit which it may disturb. There never was such a 
combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet 
it are not set down in any history. We want men 
of original perception and original action, who can 
open their eyes wider than to a nationality, namely, 
to considerations of benefit to the human race, can 
act in the interest of civilization. Government 
must not be a parish clerk, a justice of the peace. 
It has, of necessity, in any crisis of the state, the 
absolute powers of a Dictator. The existing Ad- 
ministration is entitled to the utmost candor. It 
is to be thanked for its angelic virtue, compared 
with any executive experiences with which we have 
been familiar. But the times will not allow us to 
indulge in compliment. I wish I saw in the people 
that inspiration which, if Government would not 
obey the same, would leave the Government behind 
and create on the moment the means and executors 
it wanted. Better the war should more danger- 
ously threaten us, — should threaten fracture in 
what is still whole, and punish us with burned cap- 
itals and slaughtered regiments, and so exasperate 
the people to energy, exasperate our nationality. 
There are Sciiptures written invisibly on men's 



82 AMERICAN CnVLIZATlON. 

hearts, whose letters do not come out until they are 
enraged. They can be read by war-fires, and by 
eyes in the last peril. 

We cannot but remember that there have been 
days in American history, when, if the Free States 
had done their duty, Slavery had been blocked by 
an immovable barrier, and our recent calamities 
forever precluded. The Free States yielded, and 
every compromise was surrender and invited new 
demands. Here again is a new occasion which 
Heaven offers to sense and virtue. It looks as if 
we held the fate of the fairest possession of man- 
kind in our hands, to be saved by our firmness or 
to be lost by hesitation. 

The one power that has legs long enough and 
strong enough to wade across the Potomac offers 
itself at this hour ; the one strong enough to bring 
all the civility up to the height of that which is best, 
prays now at the door of Congress for leave to 
move. Emancipation is the demand of civilization. 
That is a principle ; everything else is an intrigue. 
This is a progressive policy, puts the whole people 
in healthy, productive, amiable position, puts every 
man in the South in just and natural relations with 
every man in the North, laborer with laborer. 

I shall not attempt to unfold the details of the 
project of emancipation. It has been stated with 
great ability by several of its leading advocatea. 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 83 

1 will only advert to some leading points of the ar- 
gument, at the risk of repeating the reasons of 
others. The war is welcome to the Southerner ; a 
chivalrous sport to him, like hunting, and suits his 
semi-civilized condition. On the climbing scale of 
progress, he is just up to war, and has never ap- 
peared to such advantage as in the last twelve- 
month. It does not suit us. We are advanced 
some ages on the war-state, — to trade, art and gen. 
eral cultivation. His laborer works for him at 
home, so that he loses no labor by the war. All 
our soldiers are laborers ; so that the South, with 
its inferior numbers, is almost on a footing in effec- 
tive war-population with the North. Again, as long 
as we fight without any affirmative step taken by 
the Government, any word intimating forfeiture in 
the rebel States of their old privileges under the 
law, they and we fight on the same side, for Slavery. 
Again, if we conquer the enemy, — what then ? 
We shall still have to keep him under, and it will 
cost as much to hold him down as it did to get him 
down. Then comes the summer, and the fever will 
drive the soldiers home ; next winter we must be- 
gin at the beginning, and conquer him over again. 
What use then to take a fort, or a privateer, or get 
possession of an inlet, or to capture a regiment of 
rebels ? 

But one weapon we hold which is sure. Congress 



84 AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 

can, by edict, as a part of the military defence 
which it is the duty of Congress to provide, abolish 
slavery, and pay for such slaves as we ought to pay 
for. Then the slaves near our armies will come to 
us ; those in the interior will know in a week what 
their rights are, and will, where opportunity offers, 
prepare to take them. Instantly, the armies that 
now confront you must run home to protect their 
estates, and must stay there, and your enemies will 
disappear. 

There can be no safety until this step is taken/ 
We fancy that the endless debate, emphasized by 
the crime and by the cannons of this war, has 
brought the Free States to some conviction that it 
can never go well with us whilst this mischief of 
slavery remains in our politics, and that by concert 
or by might we must put an end to it. But we have 
too much experience of the futility of an easy reli- 
ance on the momentary good dispositions of the 
public. There does exist, perhaps, a popular will 
that the Union shall not be broken, — that our 
trade, and therefore our laws, must have the whole 
breadth of the continent, and from Canada to the 
Gulf. But, since this is the rooted belief and will 
of the people, so much the more are they in danger, 
when impatient of defeats, or impatient of taxes, to 
go with a rush for some peace ; and what kind of 
peace shall at that moment be easiest attained, they 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 85 

will make concessions for it, — will give up the 
slaves, and the whole torment of the past half-cen- 
tury will come back to be endured anew. 

Neither do I doubt, if such a composition should 
take place, that the Southerners will come back 
quietly and politely, leaving their haughty dictation. 
It will be an era of good feelings. There will be 
a lull after so loud a storm ; and, no doubt, there 
will be discreet men from that section who will 
earnestly strive to inaugurate more moderate and 
fair administration of the Government, and the 
North will for a time have its full share and more, 
in place and counsel. But this will not last ; — not 
for want of sincere good-will in sensible Southern- 
ers, but because Slavery will again speak through 
them its harsh necessity. It cannot live but by in- 
justice, and it will be unjust and violent to the end 
of the world. 

The power of Emancipation is this, that it alters 
the atomic social constitution of the Southern peo- 
ple. Now, their interest is in *keeping out white 
labor ; then, when they must pay wages, their inter- 
est will be to let it in, to get the best labor, and, if 
they fear their blacks, to invite Irish, German and 
American laborers. Thus, whilst Slavery makes 
and keeps disunion, Emancipation removes the 
whole objection to union. Emancipation at one 
stroke elevates the poor white of the South, and 



86 AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 

identifies his interest with that of the Northern 
laborer. 

Now, in the name of all that is simple and gener- 
ous, why should not this great right be done ? Why 
should not America be capable of a second stroke 
for the well-being of the human race, as eighty or 
ninety years ago she was for the first, — of an affirm- 
ative step in the interests of human civility, urged 
on her, too, not by any romance of sentiment, but 
by her own extreme perils ? It is very certain that 
the statesman who shall break through the cobwebs 
of doubt, fear and petty cavil that lie in the way, 
will be greeted by the unanimous thanks of man- 
kind. Men reconcile themselves very fast to a bold 
and good measure when once it is taken, though 
they condemned it in advance. A week before the 
two captive commissioners were surrendered to 
England, every one thought it could not be done : 
it would divide the North. It was done, and in two 
days all agreed it was the right action. And this 
action, which costs &o little, (the parties injured by 
it being such a handful that they can very easily 
be indemnified,) rids the world, at one stroke, of 
this degrading nuisance, the cause of war and ruin 
to nations. This measure at once puts all parties 
right. This is borrowing, as I said, the omnipotence 
of a principle. What is so foolish as the terror 
lest the blacks should be made furious by freedom 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 87 

and wages? It is denying these that is the outrage, 
and makes the danger from the blacks. But justice 
satisfies everybody, — white man, red man, yellow 
man and black man. All like wages, and the ap- 
petite grows by feeding. 

But this measure, to be effectual, must come 
speedily. The weapon is slipping out of our hands. 
" Time," say the Indian Scriptures, " drinketh up 
the essence of every great and noble action which 
ought to be performed, and which is delayed in the 
execution." 

I hope it is not a fatal objection to this policy 
that it is simple and beneficent thoroughly, which 
is the attribute of a moral action. An unprece- 
dented material prosperity has not tended to make 
us Stoics or Christians. But the laws by which the 
universe is organized reappear at every point, and 
will rule it. The end of all political struggle is to 
establish morality as the basis of all legislation. It 
is not free institutions, it is not a republic, it is not 
a democracy, that is the end, — no, but only the 
means. Morality is the object of government. We 
want a state of things in which crime shall not pay. 
This is the consolation on which we rest in the dark- 
ness of the future and the afflictions of to-day, that 
the government of the world is moral, and does for- 
ever destroy what is not. It is the maxim of nat- 
ural philosophers that the natural forces wear out 



88 AMERICAN CnHLTZATION. 

in time all obstacles, and take place : and it is the 
maxim of history that victory always falls at last 
where it ought to fall ; or, there is perpetual march 
and progress to ideas. But, in either case, no link 
of the chain can drop out. Nature works through 
her appointed elements ; and ideas must work 
through the brains and the arms of good and brave 
men, or they are no better than dreams. 

Since the above pages were written, President 
Lincoln has proposed to Congress that the Govern- 
ment shall co-operate with any State that shall en- 
act a gradual abolishment of Slavery. In the re- 
cent series of national successes, this Message is 
the best. It marks the happiest day in the political 
year. The American Executive ranges itself for 
the first time on the side of freedom. If Congress 
has been backward, the President has advanced. 
This state-paper is the more interesting that it ap- 
pears to be the President's individual act, done un- 
der a strong sense of duty. He speaks his own 
thought in his own style. All thanks and honor to 
the Head of the State ! The Message has been re- 
ceived throughout the country with praise, and, we 
doubt not, with more pleasure than has been spoken. 
If Congress accords with the President, it is not 
yet too late to begin the emancipation ; but we 
think it will always be too late to make it gradual. 



AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. 89 

All experience agrees that it should be immediate. 
More and better than the President has spoken 
shall, perhaps, the effect of this Message be, — but, 
we are sure, not more or better than he hoped in 
his heart, when, thoughtful of all the complexities 
of his position, he penned these cautious words. 



THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 



In so many arid forms which States incrust 
themselves with, once in a century, if so often, a 
poetic act and record occur. These are the jets of 
thought into affairs, when, roused by danger or 
inspired by genius, the political leaders of the day 
break the else insurmountable routine of class and 
local legislation, and take a step forward in the 
direction of catholic and universal interests. Every 
step in the history of political liberty is a sally of 
the human mind into the untried Future, and has 
the interest of genius, and is fruitful in heroic an- 
ecdotes. Liberty is a slow fruit. It comes, like 
religion, for short periods, and in rare conditions, 
as if awaiting a culture of the race which shall 
make it organic and permanent. Such moments 
of expansion in modern history were the Confession 
of Augsburg, the plantation of America, the Eng- 
lish Commonwealth of 1648, the Declaration of 
American Independence in 1776, the British eman- 
cipation of slaves in the West Indies, the passage 
of the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn-Laws, 



EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 91 

the Magnetic Ocean-Telegraph, though yet imper- 
fect, the passage of the Homestead Bill in the last 
Congress, and now, eminently, President Lincoln's 
Proclamation on the twenty-second of September, 
These are acts of great scope, working on a long 
future and on permanent interests, and honoring 
alike those who initiate and those who receive them. 
These measures provoke no noisy joy, but are re- 
ceived into a sympathy so deep as to apprise us 
that mankind are greater and better than we know. 
At such times it appears as if a new public were 
created to greet the new event. It is as when an 
orator, having ended the compliments and pleasant- 
ries with which he conciliated attention, and having 
run over the superficial fitness and commodities of 
the measure he urges, suddenly, lending himself to 
come happy inspiration, announces with vibrating 
voice the grand human principles involved ; — the 
bravos and wits who greeted him loudly thus far 
are surprised and overawed ; a new audience is 
found in the heart of the assembly, — an audience 
hitherto passive and unconcerned, now at last so 
searched and kindled that they come forward, 
every one a representative of mankind, standing 
for all nationalities. 

The extreme moderation with which the Presi- 
dent advanced to his design, — his long-avowed ex- 
pectant policy, as if he chose to be strictly the ex- 



92 SPEECH ON THE 

ecutive of the best public sentiment of the country, 
waiting only till it should be unmistakably pro- 
nounced, — so fair a mind that none ever listened 
so patiently to such extreme varieties of opinion, — 
so reticent that his decision has taken all parties 
by surprise, whilst yet it is just the sequel of his 
prior acts, — the firm tone in which he announces 
it, without inflation or surplusage, — all these have 
bespoken such favor to the act, that, great as the 
popularity of the President has been, we are be- 
ginning to think that we have underestimated the 
capacity and virtue which the Divine Providence 
has made an instrument of benefit so vast. He 
has been permitted to do more for America than 
any other American man. He is well entitled to 
the most indulgent construction. Forget all that 
we thought shortcomings, every mistake, every de- 
lay. In the extreme embarrassments of his part, 
call these endurance, wisdom, magnanimity; illu- 
minated, as they now are, by this dazzling success. 
When we consider the immense opposition that 
has been neutralized or converted by the progress 
of the war (for it is not long since the President 
anticipated the resignation of a large number of 
officers in the army, and the secession of three 
States, on the promulgation of this policy), — when 
we see how the great stake which foreign nations 
hold in our affairs has recently brought every Euro- 



EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 93 

pean power as a client into this court, and it be- 
came every day more apparent what gigantic and 
what remote interests were to be affected by the 
decision of the President, — one can hardly say the 
deliberation was too long. Against all timorous 
counsels he had the courage to seize the moment ; 
and such was his position, and such the felicity at- 
tending the action, that he has replaced Govern- 
ment in the good graces of mankind. " Better is 
virtue in the sovereign than plenty in the season," 
say the Chinese. 'Tis wonderful what power is, 
and how ill it is used, and how its ill use makes 
life mean, and the sunshine dark. Life in America 
had lost much of its attraction in the later years. 
The virtues of a good magistrate undo a world of 
mischief, and, because Nature works with rectitude, 
seem vastly more potent than the acts of bad gov- 
ernors, which are ever tempered by the good-nature 
in the people, and the incessant resistance which 
fraud and violence encounter. The acts of good 
governors work a geometrical ratio, as one midsum- 
mer day seems to repair the damage of a year of 
war. 

A day which most of us dared not hope to see, 
an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs 
and uncertainties, seems now to be close before us. 
October, November, December will have passed 
over beating hearts and plotting brains : then the 



94 SPEECH ON THE 

hour will strike, and all men of African descent 
who have faculty enough to find their way to our 
lines are assured of the protection of American 
law. 

It is by no means necessary that this measure 
shoidd be suddenly marked by any signal results 
on the negroes or on the Rebel masters. The force 
of the act is that it commits the country to this 
justice, — that it compels the innumerable officers, 
civil, military, naval, of the Republic to range 
themselves on the line of this equity. It draws the 
fashion to this side. It is not a measure that ad- 
mits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be un- 
done by a new Administration. For slavery over- 
powers the disgust of the moral sentiment only 
through immemorial usage. It cannot be intro- 
duced as an improvement of the nineteenth century. 
This act makes that the lives of our heroes have 
not been sacrificed in vain. It makes a victory of 
our defeats. Our hurts are healed ; the health of 
the nation is repaired. With a victory like this, 
we can stand many disasters. It does not promise 
the redemption of the black race ; that lies not with 
us : but it relieves it of our opposition. The Presi- 
dent by this act has paroled all the slaves in Amer- 
ica ; they will no more fight against us i and it re- 
lieves our race once for all of its crime and false 
position. The first condition of success is secured 



EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 95 

in putting ourselves right. We have recovered 
ourselves from our false position, and planted our- 
selves on a law of Nature : 

" If that fail, 
The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
And earth's base built on stubble." 

The Government has assured itself of the best con- 
stituency in the world : every spark of intellect, 
every virtuous feeling, every religious heart, every 
man of honor, every poet, every philosopher, the 
generosity of the cities, the health of the country, 
the strong arms of the mechanic, the endurance of 
farmers, the passionate conscience of women, the 
sympathy of distant nations, — all rally to its sup- 
port. 

Of course, we are assuming the firmness of the 
policy thus declared. It must not be a paper proc- 
lamation. We confide that Mr. Lincoln is in ear- 
nest, and, as he has been slow in making up his 
mind, has resisted the importunacy of parties and 
of events to the latest moment, he will be as abso- 
lute in his adhesion. Not only will he repeat and 
follow up his stroke, but the nation will add its ir- 
resistible strength. If the ruler has duties, so has 
the citizen. In times like these, when the nation is 
imperilled, what man can, without shame, receive 
good news from day to day without giving good 
news of himself ? What right has any one to read 



96 SPEECH ON THE 

in the journals tidings of victories, if he has not 
bought them by his own valor, treasure, personal 
sacrifice, or by service as good in his own depart- 
ment? With this blot removed from our national 
honor, this heavy load lifted off the national heart, 
we shall not fear henceforward to show our faces 
among mankind. We shall cease to be hypocrites 
and pretenders, but what we have styled our free 
institutions will be such. 

In the light of this event the public distress be- 
gins to be removed. What if the brokers' quota- 
tions show our stocks discredited, and the gold dol- 
lar costs one hundred and twenty-seven cents? 
These tables are fallacious. Every acre in the 
Free States gained substantial value on the twenty- 
second of September. The cause of disunion and 
war has been reached and begun to be removed. 
Every man's house-lot and garden are relieved of 
the malaria which the purest winds and strongest 
sunshine could not penetrate and purge. The ter- 
ritory of the Union shines to-day with a lustre 
which every European emigrant can discern from 
far ; a sign of inmost security and permanence. Is 
it feared that taxes will check immigration ? That 
depends on what the taxes are spent for. If they 
go to fill up this yawning Dismal Swamp, which en- 
gulfed armies and populations, and created plague, 
and neutralized hitherto all the vast capabilities of 



EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 97 

this continent, — then this taxation, which makes 
the land wholesome and habitable, and will draw all 
men unto it, is the best investment in which prop- 
erty-holder ever lodged his earnings. 

Whilst we have pointed out the opportuneness of 
the Proclamation, it remains to be said that the 
President had no choice. He might look wistfully 
for what variety of courses lay open to him ; every 
line but one was closed up with fire. This one, too, 
bristled with danger, but through it was the sole 
safety. The measure he has adopted was impera- 
tive. It is wonderful to see the unseasonable senil- 
ity of what is called the Peace Party, through all its 
masks, blinding their eyes to the main feature of 
the war, namely, its inevitableness. The war ex- 
isted long before the cannonade of Sumter, and 
could not be postponed. It might have begun other- 
wise or elsewhere, but war was in the minds and 
bones of the combatants, it was written on the iron 
leaf, and you might as easily dodge gravitation. If 
we had consented to a peaceable secession of the 
Rebels, the divided sentiment of the Border States 
made peaceable secession impossible, the insatiable 
temper of the South made it impossible, and the 
slaves on the border, wherever the border might be, 
were an incessant fuel to rekindle the fire. Give 
the Confederacy New Orleans, Charleston, and Rich- 
mond, and they would have demanded St. Louis 



98 SPEECH ON THE 

and Baltimore. Give them these, and they would 
have insisted on Washington. Give them Wash- 
ington, and they would have assumed the army and 
navy, and, through these, Philadelphia, New York, 
and Boston. It looks as if the battle-field would 
have been at least as large in that event as it is 
now. The war was formidable, but could not be 
avoided. The war was and is an immense mischief, 
but brought with it the immense benefit of drawing 
a line and rallying the Free States to fix it impas- 
sably, — preventing the whole force of Southern 
connection and influence throughout the North from 
distracting every city with endless confusion, de- 
taching that force and reducing it to handfuls, and, 
in the progress of hostilities, disinfecting us of our 
habitual proclivity, through the affection of trade 
and the traditions of the Democratic party, to follow 
Southern leading. 

These necessities which have dictated the conduct 
of the Federal Government are overlooked especial- 
ly by our foreign critics. The popular statement 
of the opponents of the war abroad is the impossi- 
bility of our success. " If you could add," say they, 
" to your strength the whole army of England, of 
France and of Austria, you could not coerce eight 
millions of people to come under this Government 
against their will." This is an odd thing for an 
Englishman, a Frenchman, or an Austrian to say, 



EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 99 

who remembers Europe of the last seventy years, 
— the condition of Italy, until 1859, — of Poland, 
since 1793, — of France, of French Algiers, — of 
British Ireland, and British India. But, granting 
the truth, rightly read, of the historical aphorism, 
that " the people always conquer," it is to be noted 
that, in the Southern States, the tenure of land 
and the local laws, with slavery, give the social sys- 
tem not a democratic but an aristocratic complex- 
ion ; and those States have shown every year a more 
hostile and aggressive temper, until the instinct of 
self-preservation forced us into the war. And the 
aim of the war on our part is indicated by the aim 
of the President's Proclamation, namely, to break 
up the false combination of Southern society, to 
destroy the piratic feature in it which makes it our 
enemy only as it is the enemy of the human race, 
and so allow its reconstruction on a just and health- 
ful basis. Then new affinities will act, the old re- 
pulsion will cease, and, the cause of war being re- 
moved, Nature and trade may be trusted to establish 
a lasting peace. 

We think we cannot overstate the wisdom and 
benefit of this act of the Government. The malis- 
nant cry of the Secession press within the Free 
States, and the recent action of the Confederate 
Congress, are decisive as to its efficiency and cor- 
rectness of aim. Not less so is the silent joy which 



100 EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 

has greeted it in all generous hearts, and the new 
hope it has breathed into the world. It was well 
to delay the steamers at the wharves until this edict 
could be put on board. It will be an insurance to 
the ship as it goes plunging through the sea with 
glad tidings to all people. Happy are the young, 
who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, 
leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the 
old, who see Nature purified before they depart. 
Do not let the dying die : hold them back to this 
world, until you have charged their ear and heart 
with this message to other spiritual societies, an- 
nouncing the melioration of our planet : 

" Incertainties now crown themselves assured, 
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age." 

Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which 
the Proclamation respects will lose somewhat of the 
dejection sculptured for ages in their bronzed coun- 
tenance, uttered in the wailing of their plaintive 
music, — a race naturally benevolent, docile, indus- 
trious, and whose very miseries sprang from their 
great talent for usefulness, which, in a more moral 
age, will not only defend their independence, but 
will give them a rank among nations. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN". 



We meet under the gloom of a calamity which 
darkens down over the minds of good men in all 
civil society, as the fearful tidings travel over sea, 
over land, from country to country, like the shadow 
of an uncalculated eclipse over the planet. Old as 
history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt 
if any death has caused so much pain to mankind 
as this has caused, or will cause, on its announce- 
ment ; and this, not so much because nations are 
by modern arts brought so closely together, as be- 
cause of the mysterious hopes and fears which, in 
the present day, are connected with the name and 
institutions of America. 

In this country, on Saturday, every one was 
struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, 
as he meditated on the ghastly blow. And perhaps, 
at this hour, when the coffin which contains the 
dust of the President sets forward on its long march 
through mourning States, on its way to his home in 
Illinois, we might well be silent, and suffer the aw- 
ful voices of the time to thunder to us. Yes, but 



102 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

that first despair was brief : the man was not so to 
be mourned. He was the most active and hopeful 
of men ; and his work had not perished : but accla- 
mations of praise for the task he had accomplished 
burst out into a song of triumph, which even tears 
for his death cannot keep down. 

The President stood before us as a man of the 
people. He was thoroughly American, had never 
crossed the sea, had never been spoiled by English 
insularity or French dissipation ; a quite native, 
aboriginal man,' as an acorn from the oak ; no ap- 
ing of foreigners, no frivolous accomplishments, 
Kentuckian born, working on a farm, a flatboat- 
man, a captain in the Black Hawk war, a country 
lawyer, a representative in the rural Legislature of 
Illinois ; — on such modest foundations the broad 
structure of his fame was laid. How slowly, and 
yet by happily prepared steps, he came to his place. 
All of us remember, — it is only a history of five 
or six years, — the surprise and the disappointment 
of the country at his first nomination by the Con- 
vention at Chicago. Mr. Seward, then in the cul- 
mination of his good fame, was the favorite of the 
Eastern States. And when the new and compara- 
tively unknown name of Lincoln was announced, 
(notwithstanding the report of the acclamations of 
that Convention,) we heard the result coldly and 
sadly. It seemed too rash, on a purely local repu- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 103 

tation, to build so grave a trust in such anxious 
times ; and men naturally talked of the chances in 
politics as incalculable. But it turned out not to 
be chance. The profound good opinion which the 
people of Illinois and of the West had conceived of 
him, and which they had imparted to their col- 
leagues that they also might justify themselves to 
their constituents at home, was not rash, though 
they did not begin to know the riches of his worth. 
A plain man of the people, an extraordinary for- 
tune attended him. He offered no shining qualities 
at the first encounter ; he did not offend by superior- 
ity. He had a face and manner which disarmed 
suspicion, which inspired confidence, which con- 
firmed good-will. He was a man without vices. He 
had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy 
for him to obey. Then, he had what farmers call 
a long head ; was excellent in working out the sum 
for himself ; in arguing his case and convincing you 
fairly and firmly. Then, it turned out that he was 
a great worker ; had prodigious faculty of perform- 
ance ; worked easily. A good worker is so rare ; 
everybody has some disabling quality. In a host 
of young men that start together and promise so 
many brilliant leaders for the next age, each fails 
on trial ; one by bad health, one by conceit, or by 
love of pleasure, or lethargy, or an ugly temper, — ■ 
each has some disqualifying fault that throws him 



104 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

out of the career. But this man was sound to the 
core, cheerful, persistent, all right for labor, and 
liked nothing so well. 

Then, he had a vast good-nature, which made him 
tolerant and accessible to all ; fair-minded, leaning 
to the claim of the petitioner ; affable, and not sen- 
sible to the affliction which the innumerable visits 
paid to him when President would have brought 
to any one else. And how this good-nature became 
a noble humanity, in many a tragic case which the 
events of the war brought to him, every one will re- 
member ; and with what increasing tenderness he 
dealt when a whole race was thrown on his compas- 
sion. The poor negro said of him, on an impres- 
sive occasion, " Massa Linkum am eberywhere." 

Then his broad good-humor, running easily into 
jocular talk, in which he delighted and in which he 
excelled, was a rich gift to this wise man. It en- 
abled him to keep his secret ; to meet every kind of 
man and every rank in society ; to take off the edge 
of the severest decisions ; to mask his own purpose 
and sound his companion ; and to catch with true 
instinct the temper of every company he addressed. 
And, more than all, it is to a man of severe labor, 
in anxious and exhausting crises, the natural restor- 
ative, good as sleep, and is the protection of the 
overdriven brain against rancor and insanity. 

He is the author of a multitude of good sayings, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 105 

so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they 
had no reputation at first but as jests ; and only 
later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find 
in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom 
of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a 
period of less facility of printing, he would have 
become mythological in a very few years, like iEsop 
or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by 
his fables and proverbs. But the weight and pene- 
tration of many passages in his letters, messages 
and speeches, hidden now by the very closeness of 
their application to the moment, are destined here- 
after to wide fame. What pregnant definitions; 
what unerring common sense ; what foresight ; and, 
on great occasion, what lofty, and more than na- 
tional, what humane tone! His brief speech at 
Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words 
on any recorded occasion. This, and one other 
American speech, that of John Brown to the court 
that tried him, and a part of Kossuth's speech at 
Birmingham, can only be compared with each 
other, and with no fourth. 

His occupying the chair of State was a triumph 
of the good-sense of mankind, and of the public 
conscience. This middle-class country had got a 
middle-class President, at last. Yes, in manners 
and sympathies, but not in powers, for his powers 
were superior. This man grew according to the 



106 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

need. His mind mastered the problem of the day; 
and, as the problem grew, so did his comprehen- 
sion of it. Karely was man so fitted to the event. 
In the midst of fears and jealousies, in the Babel 
of counsels and parties, this man wrought inces- 
santly with all his might and all his honesty, labor- 
ing to find what the people wanted, and how to 
obtain that. It cannot be said there is any exag- 
geration of his worth. If ever a man was fairly 
tested, he was. There was no lack of resistance, 
nor of slander, nor of ridicule. The times have al- 
lowed no state secrets , the nation has been in such 
ferment, such multitudes had to be trusted, that no 
secret could be kept. Every door was ajar, and we 
know all that befell. 

Then, what an occasion was the whirlwind of the 
war. Here was place for no holiday magistrate, 
no fair-weather sailor ; the new pilot was hurried 
to the helm in a tornado. In four years, — four 
years of battle-days, — his endurance, his fertility 
of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried 
and never found wanting. There, by his courage, 
his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his 
humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of 
a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the 
American people in his time. Step by step he 
walked before them; slow with their slowness, 
quickening his march by theirs, the true represen- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 107 

tative of this continent ; an entirely public man ; 
father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions 
throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds 
articulated by his tongue. 

Adam Smith remarks that the axe, which in 
Houbraken's portraits of British kings and wor- 
thies is engraved under those who have suffered at 
the block, adds a certain lofty charm to the picture. 
And who does not see, even in this tragedy so re- 
cent, how fast the terror and ruin of the massacre 
are already burning into glory around the victim ? 
Far happier this fate than to have lived to be 
wished away ; to have watched the decay of his 
own faculties ; to have seen, — perhaps even he, 
— the proverbial ingratitude of statesmen ; to have 
seen mean men preferred. Had he not lived long 
enough to keep the greatest promise that ever man 
made to his fellow-men, — the practical abolition 
of slavery ? He had seen Tennessee, Missouri and 
Maryland emancipate their slaves. He had seen 
Savannah, Charleston and Richmond surrendered ; 
had seen the main army of the rebellion lay down 
its arms. He had conquered the public opinion of 
Canada, England and France. Only Washington 
can compare with him in fortune. 

And what if it should turn out, in the unfolding 
of the web, that he had reached the term ; that 
this heroic deliverer could no longer serve us ; that 



108 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

the rebellion had touched its natural conclusion, 
and what remained to be done required new and 
uncommitted hands, — a new spirit born out of the 
ashes of the war; and that Heaven, wishing to 
show the world a completed benefactor, shall make 
him serve his country even more by his death than 
by his life ? Nations, like kings, are not good by 
facility and complaisance. " The kindness of kings 
consists in justice and strength." Easy good-na- 
ture has been the dangerous foible of the Republic, 
and it was necessary that its enemies should out- 
rage it, and drive us to unwonted firmness, to se- 
cure the salvation of this country in the next ages. 
The ancients believed in a serene and beautiful 
Genius which ruled in the affairs of nations ; which, 
with a slow but stern justice, carried forward the 
fortunes of certain chosen houses, weeding out sin- 
gle offenders or offending families, and securing 
at last the firm prosperity of the favorites of 
Heaven. It was too narrow a view of the Eternal 
Nemesis. There is a serene Providence which rules 
the fate of nations, which makes little account of 
time, little of one generation or race, makes no ac- 
count of disasters, conquers alike by what is called 
defeat or by what is called victory, thrusts aside en- 
emy and obstruction, crushes everything immoral as 
inhuman, and obtains the ultimate triumph of the 
best race by the sacrifice of everything which resists 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 109 

the moral laws of the world. It makes its own in- 
struments, creates the man for the time, trains him 
in poverty, inspires his genius, and arms him for 
his task. It has given every race its own talent, 
and ordains that only that race which combines 
perfectly with the virtues of all shall endure. 



THE AMEKICAJS SCHOLAB. 



Me. President and Gentlemen, 

I greet you on the recommencement of our lit- 
erary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, 
perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet 
for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of 
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient 
Greeks ; for parliaments of love and poesy, like 
the Troubadours ; nor for the advancement of sci- 
ence, like our contemporaries in the British and 
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been 
simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of 
letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters 
any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an 
indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is al- 
ready come when it ought to be, and will be, some- 
thing else ; when the sluggard intellect of this con- 
tinent will look from under its iron lids and fill the 
postponed expectation of the world with something 
better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our 
day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the 
learning of other lands, draws to a close. The mil- 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Ill 

lions that around us are rushing into life, cannot 
always be fed on the sere remains of foreign har- 
vests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, 
that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that 
poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star 
in the constellation Harp, which now flames in ou* 
zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the 
pole-star for a thousand years ? 

In this hope I accept the topic which not only 
usage but the nature of our association seem to 
prescribe to this day, — the American Scholar. 
Year by year we come up hither to read one more 
chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what 
light new days and events have thrown on his char- 
acter and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown 
antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the 
gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that 
he might be more helpful to himself; just as the 
hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer 
its end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and 
sublime: that there is One Man,— present to all 
particular men only partially, or through one fac- 
ulty ; and that you must take the whole society to 
find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a 
professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is 
priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, 



112 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

and soldier. In the divided or social state these 
functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of 
whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst 
each other performs his. The fable implies that 
the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes 
return from his own labor to embrace all the other 
laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, 
this fountain of power, has been so distributed to 
multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and 
peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and can- 
not be gathered. The state of society is one in 
which the members have suffered amputation from 
the trunk, and strut about so many walking mon- 
sters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an el- 
bow, but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into 
many things. The planter, who is Man sent out 
into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by 
any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He 
sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, 
and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the 
farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal 
worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of 
Ibis craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The 
priest becomes a form ; the attorney a statute-book ; 
the mechanic a machine ; the sailor a rope of the 
ship. 

In this distribution of functions the scholar is 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 113 

the delegated intellect. In the right state he is 
Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when 
the victim of society, he tends to become a mere 
thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's 
thinking. 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the the- 
ory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits 
with all her placid, all her monitory pictures ; him 
the past instructs ; him the future invites. Is not 
indeed every man a student, and do not all things 
exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not 
the true scholar the only true master ? But the 
old oracle said, " All things have two handles : be- 
ware of the wrong one." In life, too often, the 
scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privi- 
lege. Let us see him in his school, and consider 
him in reference to the main influences he re- 
ceives. 

I. The first in time and the first in importance 
of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. 
Every day, the sun ; and, after sunset, Night and 
her stars. Ever the winds blow ; ever the grass 
grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, 
beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all 
men whom this spectacle most engages. He must 
settle its value in his mind. What is nature to 
him ? There is never a beginning, there is never 



114 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web 
of God, but always circular power returning into it- 
self. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose 
beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so 
entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors 
shine, system on system shooting like rays, up- 
ward, downward, without centre, without circum- 
ference, — in the mass and in the particle, Nature 
hastens to render account of herself to the mind. 
Classification begins. To the young mind every 
thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it 
finds how to join two things and see in them one 
nature ; then three, then three thousand ; and so, 
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes 
on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, 
discovering roots running under ground whereby 
contrary and remote things cohere and flower out 
from one stem. It presently learns that since the 
dawn of history there has been a constant accumu- 
lation and classifying of facts. But what is classi- 
fication but the perceiving that these objects are 
not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law 
which is also a law of the human mind ? The as- 
tronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstrac- 
tion of the human mind, is the measure of plan- 
etary motion. The chemist finds proportions and 
intelligible method throughout matter ; and sci- 
ence is nothing but the finding of analogy, iden- 



TEE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 115 

tity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious sou] 
sits down before each refractory fact ; one after an- 
other reduces all strange constitutions, all new pow- 
ers, to their class and their law, and goes on for- 
ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the 
outskirts of nature, by insight. 

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bend- 
ing dome of day, is suggested that he and it pro- 
ceed from one root ; one is leaf and one is flower ; 
relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And 
what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? 
A thought too bold ; a dream too wild. Yet when 
this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of 
more earthly natures, — when he has learned to 
worship the soul, and to see that the natural philo- 
sophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its 
gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever ex- 
panding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He 
shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, 
answering to it part for part. One is seal and one 
is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. 
Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature 
then becomes to him the measure of his attain- 
ments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so 
much of his own mind does he not yet possess. 
And, in fine, the ancient precept, " Know thyself," 
and the modern precept, " Study nature," become 
at last one maxim. 



116 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

II. The next great influence 'nto the spirit of 
the scholar is the mind of the Past, — in whatever 
form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, 
that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of 
the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get 
at the truth, — learn the amount of this influence 
more conveniently, — by considering their value 
alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of 
the first age received into him the world around ; 
brooded thereon ; gave it the new arrangement of 
his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into 
him life; it went out from him truth. It came 
to him short-lived actions ; it went out from him 
immortal thoughts. It came to him business ; it 
went from him poetry. It was dead fact ; now, it 
is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It 
now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Pre- 
cisely in proportion to the depth of mind from 
which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does 
it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the pro- 
cess had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In 
proportion to the completeness of the distillation, 
so will the purity and imperishableness of the pro- 
duct be. But none is quite perfect. As no air- 
pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, 
so neither can any artist entirely exclude the con* 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 117 

ventional, the local, the perishable from his book, 
or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as 
efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to 
contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each 
age, it is found, must write its own books ; or 
rather, each generation for the next succeeding. 
The books of an older period will not fit this. 

Yet hence arises o, grave mischief. The sacred- 
ness which attaches to the act of creation, the act 
of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet 
chanting was felt to be a divine man : henceforth 
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and 
wise spirit : henceforward it is settled the book is 
perfect ; as love of the hero corrupts into worship 
of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious : 
the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted 
mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incur- 
sions of Reason, having once so opened, having 
once received this book, stands upon it, and makes 
an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built 
on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by 
Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start 
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not 
from their own sight of principles. Meek young 
men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to 
accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which 
Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, 
and Bacon were only young men in libraries when 
they wrote these books. 



118 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the 
bookworm. Hence the book -learned class, who 
value books, as such ; not as related to nature and 
the human constitution, but as making a sort of 
Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence 
the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bib- 
liomaniacs of all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used ; abused, 
among the worst. What is the right use ? What 
is the one end which all means go to effect ? They 
are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never 
see a book than to be warped by its attraction 
clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite in- 
stead of a system. The one thing in the world, of 
value, is the active soul. This every man is en- 
titled to ; this every man contains within him, 
although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet 
unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and 
utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius ; 
not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but 
the sound estate of every man. In its essence it 
is progressive. The book, the college, the school 
of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some 
past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, 
— let us hold by this. They pin me down. They 
look backward and not forward. But genius looks 
forward : the eyes of man are set in his forehead, 
not in his hindhead; man hopes: genius creates. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 119 

Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, 
the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ; — cinders 
and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There 
are creative manners, there are creative actions, 
and creative words ; manners, actions, words, that 
is, indicative of no custom or authority, but spring- 
ing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good 
and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, 
let it receive from another mind its truth, though 
it were in torrents of light, without periods of soli- 
tude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disser- 
vice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the en- 
emy of genius by over-influence. The literature of 
every nation bears me witness. The English dra- 
matic poets have Shakspearized now for two hun- 
dred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so 
it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must 
not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for 
the scholar's idle times. When he can read God 
directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in 
other men's transcripts of their readings. But 
when the intervals of darkness come, as come they 
must, — when the sun is hid and the stars with- 
draw their shining, — we repair to the lamps 
which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps 
to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, 



120 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, " A 
fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure 
we derive from the best books. They impress us 
with the conviction that one nature wrote and the 
same reads. We read the verses of one of the 
great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of 
Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleas- 
ure, I mean, which is in great part caused by 
the abstraction of all time from their verses. There 
is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, 
when this poet, who lived in some past world, two 
or three hundred years ago, says that which lies 
close to my own soul, that which I also had well- 
nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence 
afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the iden- 
tity of all minds, we should suppose some preestab- 
lished harmony, some foresight of souls that were 
to be, and some preparation of stores for their fu- 
ture wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay 
up food before death for the young grub they shall 
never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by 
any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the 
Book. We all know, that as the human body can 
be nourished on any food, though it were boiled 
grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind 
can be fed by any knowledge. And great and 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 121 

heroic men have existed who had almost no other 
information than by the printed page. I only 
would say that it needs a strong head to bear that 
diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As 
the proverb says, " He that would bring home the 
wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of 
the Indies." There is then creative reading as well 
as creative writing. When the mind is braced by 
labor and invention, the page of whatever book 
we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. 
Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense 
of our author is as broad as the world. We then 
see, what is always true, that as the seer's hour of 
vision is short and rare among heavy days and 
months, so is its record, perchance, the least part 
of his volume. The discerning will read, in his 
Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, — only 
the authentic utterances of the oracle ; — all the 
rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's 
and Shakspeare's. 

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indis- 
pensable to a wise man. History and exact science 
he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like 
manner, have their indispensable office, — to teach 
elements. But they can only highly serve us when 
they aim not to drill, but to create ; when they 
gather from far every ray of various genius to their 
hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set 



122 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and 
knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pre- 
tension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foun- 
dations, though of towns of gold, can never counter- 
vail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this 5 
and our American colleges will recede in their pub- 
lic importance, whilst they grow richer every year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion that the 
scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as 
unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a pen- 
knife for an axe. The so-called " practical men " 
sneer at speculative men, as if, because they specu- 
late or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it 
said that the clergy, — who are always, more uni- 
versally than any other class, the scholars of their 
day, — are addressed as women ; that the rough, 
spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, 
but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are 
often virtually disfranchised ; and indeed there are 
advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true 
of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Ac- 
tion is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essen- 
tial. Without it he is not yet man. Without it 
thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the 
world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we 
cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, 
but there can be no scholar without the heroic 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 123 

mind. The preamble of thought, the transition 
through which it passes from the unconscious to the 
conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as 
I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are 
loaded with life, and whose not. 

The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me^ 
lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys 
which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted 
with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding 
tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and 
take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, 
taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss 
be vocal with speech. I pierce its order ; I dissi- 
pate its fear ; I dispose of it within the circuit of 
my expanding life. So much only of life as I know 
by experience, so much of the wilderness have I 
vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended 
my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man 
can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, 
to spare any action in which he can partake. It is 
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, ca- 
lamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in elo- 
quence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges 
every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of 
power. 

It is the raw material out of which the intellect 
moulds her splendid products. A strange process 
too, this by which experience is converted into 



124 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. 
The manufacture goes forward at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth 
are now matters of calmest observation. They lie 
like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our re- 
cent actions, — with the business which we now have 
in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate 
Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no 
more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the 
hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is 
yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed 
in our unconscious life. In some contemplative 
hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, 
to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is 
raised, transfigured ; the corruptible has put on in- 
corruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, 
however base its origin and neighborhood. Ob- 
serve too the impossibility of antedating this act. 
In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is 
a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, 
the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is 
an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, 
in our private history, which shall not, sooner or 
later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us 
by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cra- 
dle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of 
boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids 
and berries, and many another fact that once filled 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 125 

the whole sky, are gone already ; friend and rela- 
tive, profession and party, town and country, nation 
and world, must also soar and sing. 

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength 
in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom. I 
will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and 
transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger 
and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single 
faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much 
like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood 
by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking 
Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the 
mountain to find stock, and discovered that they 
had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Au- 
thors we have, in numbers, who have written out 
their vein, and who, moved by a commendable pru- 
dence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trap- 
per into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to 
replenish their merchantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar 
would be covetous of action. Life is our diction- 
ary. Years are well spent in country labors ; in 
town ; in the insight into trades and manufactures ; 
in frank intercourse with many men and women ; 
in science ; in art ; to the one end of mastering in 
all their facts a language by which to illustrate 
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately 
from any speaker how much he has already lived, 



126 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. 
Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we 
get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. 
This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and 
books only copy the language which the field and 
the work-yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of books, 
and better than books, is that it is a resource. 
That great principle of Undulation in nature, that 
shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the 
breath ; in desire and satiety ; in the ebb and flow 
of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; 
and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom 
and every fluid, is known to us under the name of 
Polarity, — these " fits of easy transmission and 
reflection," as Newton called them, — are the law 
of nature because they are the law of spirit. 

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit re- 
produces the other. When the artist has exhausted 
his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, 
when thoughts are no longer apprehended and 
books are a weariness, — he has always the re- 
source to live. Character is higher than intellect. 
Thinking is the function. Living is the function- 
ary. The stream retreats to its source. A great 
soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to 
think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart 
his truth ? He can still fall back on this eleinen- 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 127 

tal force of living them. This is a total act. 
Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of 
justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of af- 
fection cheer his lowly roof. Those " far from 
fame," who dwell and act with him, will feel the 
force of his constitution in the doings and passages 
of the day better than it can be measured by any 
public and designed display. Time shall teach him 
that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. 
Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, 
screened from influence. What is lost in seemli- 
ness is gained in strength. Not out of those on 
whom systems of education have exhausted their 
culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old 
or to build the new, but out of unhandselled sav- 
age nature ; out of terrible Druids and Berserkers 
come at last Alfred and Shakspeare. 

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning 
to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to 
every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the 
spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. 
And labor is everywhere welcome ; always we are 
invited to work ; only be this limitation observed, 
that a man shall not for the sake of wider activ- 
ity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments 
and modes of action. 

I have now spoken of the education of the 



128 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It re- 
mains to say somewhat of his duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They 
may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of 
the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men 
by showing them facts amidst appearances. He 
plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of ob- 
servation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their 
glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with 
the praise of all men, and the results being splen- 
did and useful, honor is sure# But he, in his pri- 
vate observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous 
stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has 
thought of as such, — watching days and months 
sometimes for a few facts ; correcting still his old 
records ; — must relinquish display and immediate 
fame. In the long period of his preparation he 
must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in 
popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who 
shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his 
speech; often forego the living for the dead. 
Worse yet, he must accept, — how often ! poverty 
and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of tread- 
ing the old road, accepting the fashions, the educa- 
tion, the religion of society, he takes the cross of 
making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, 
the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss 
of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 129 

the way of the self -relying and self-directed ; and 
the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to 
stand to society, and especially to educated society. 
For all this loss and scorn, what offset ? He is to 
find consolation in e: ercising the highest functions 
of human nature. He is one who raises himself 
from private considerations and breathes and lives 
on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the 
world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to re- 
sist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to 
barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic 
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and 
the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles 
the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn 
hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world 
of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. 
And whatsoever new verdict Keason from her in- 
violable seat pronounces on the passing men and 
events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promul- 
gate. 

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel 
all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the 
popular cry. He and he only knows the world. 
The world of any moment is the merest appearance. 
Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, 
some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up 
by half mankind and cried down by the other half, 
as if all depended on this particular up or down. 



130 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

The odds are that the whole question is not worth 
the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in 
listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his 
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack 
of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe ab- 
straction, let him hold by himself ; add observation 
to observation, patient of neglect, patient of re- 
proach, and bide his own time, — happy enough if 
he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has 
seen something truly. Success treads on every right 
step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to 
tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns 
that in going down into the secrets of his own mind 
he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He 
learns that he who has mastered any law in his pri- 
vate thoughts, is master to that extent of all men 
whose language he speaks, and of all into whose 
language his own can be translated. The poet, in 
utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts 
and recording them, is found to have recorded that 
which men in crowded cities find true for them also. 
The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank 
confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons 
he addresses, until he finds that he is the comple- 
ment of his hearers ; — that they drink his words 
because he fulfils for them their own nature ; the 
deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest pre- 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 131 

sentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most 
acceptable, most public, and universally true. The 
people delight in it ; the better part of every man 
feels, This is my music ; this is myself. 

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended,, 
Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free 
even to the definition of freedom, " without any 
hindrance that does not arise out of his own consti- 
tution." Brave ; for fear is a thing which a scholar 
by his very function puts behind him. Fear always 
springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his 
tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the 
presumption that like children and women his is 
a protected class ; or if he seek a temporary peace 
by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or 
vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich 
in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, 
and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his 
courage up. So is the danger a danger still ; so is 
the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. 
Let him look into its eye and search its nature, in- 
spect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — 
which lies no great way back ; he will then find in 
himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and 
extent ; he will have made his hands meet on the 
other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on 
superior. The world is his who can see through its 
pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind cus- 



132 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

torn, what overgrown error you behold is there only 
by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a 
lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It k 
a mischievous notion that we are come late into na- 
ture ; that the world was finished a long time ago c 
As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of 
God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we 
bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They 
adapt themselves to it as they may ; but in propor- 
tion as a man has any thing in him divine, the fir- 
mament flows before him and takes his signet and 
form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but 
he who can alter my state of mind. They are the 
kings of the world who give the color of their pres- 
ent thought to all nature and all art, and persuade 
men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the 
matter, that this thing which they do is the apple 
which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last 
ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great 
man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald 
sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes 
botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from 
the farmer and the herb-woman ; Davy, chemistry; 
and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his who 
works in it with serenity and great aims. The un- 
stable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind 
is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the 
Atlantic follow the moon. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 133 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can 
be fathomed, — darker than can be enlightened. 
I might not carry with me the feeling of my au- 
dience in stating my own belief. But I have al- 
ready shown the ground of my hope, in adverting 
to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has 
been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has 
almost lost the light that can lead him back to his 
prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men 
in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are 
spawn, and are called " the mass " and " the herd." 
In a century, in a millennium, one or two men ; 
that is to say, one or two approximations to the 
right state of every man. All the rest behold in 
the hero or the poet their own green and crude 
being, — ripened ; yes, and are content to be less, 
so that may attain to its full stature. What a testi- 
mony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the 
demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, 
the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his 
chief. The poor and the low find some amends to 
their immense moral capacity, for their acquies- 
cence in a political and social inferiority. They 
are content to be brushed like flies from the path 
of a great person, so that justice shall be done by 
him to that common nature which it is the dearest 
desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They 
sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it 



134 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

to be their own element. They cast the dignity of 
man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders 
of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood 
to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews 
combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live 
in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money 
or power ; and power because it is as good as money, 
— the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why 
not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in 
their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake 
them and they shall quit the false good and leap to 
the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. 
This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual do- 
mestication of the idea of Culture. The main en- 
terprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the 
upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials 
strewn along the ground. The private life of one 
man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more 
formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in 
its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in his- 
tory. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendetta 
the particular natures of all men. Each philoso- 
pher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, 
as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. 
The books which once we valued more than the 
apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What 
is that but saying that we have come up with the 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 135 

point of view which the universal mind took through 
the eyes of one scribe ; we have been that man, and 
have passed on. First, one, then another, we drain 
all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these sup- 
plies, we crave a better and more abundant food* 
The man has never lived that can feed us ever e 
The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person 
who shall set a barrier on any one side to this un= 
bounded, unboundable empire. It is one central 
fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, light- 
ens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat 
of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards 
of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a 
thousand stars. It is one soul which animates 
all men. 

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this ab- 
straction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay 
longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference 
to the time and to this country. 

Historically, there is thought to be a difference 
in the ideas which predominate over successive 
epochs, and there are data for marking the genius 
of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Re- 
flective or Philosophical age. With the views I 
have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the 
mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell 
on these differences. In fact, I believe each indi- 



136 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

vidua! passes through all three. The boy is a Greek ; 
the youth, romantic ; the arl alt, reflective. I deny 
not however that a revolution in the leading idea 
may be distinctly enough traced. 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. 
Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are crit- 
ical ; we are embarrassed with second thoughts ; we 
cannot enjoy any tiling for hankering to know 
whereof the pleasure consists ; we are lined with 
eyes ; we see with our feet ; the time is infected 
with Hamlet's unhappiness, — 

" Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

It is so bad then ? Sight is the last thing to be 
pitied. Would we be blind ? Do we fear lest we 
should out see nature and God, and drink truth 
dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary 
class as a mere announcement of the fact that they 
find themselves not in the state of mind of their 
fathers, and regret the coming state as untried ; as 
a boy dreads the water before he has learned that 
he can swim. If there is any period one would de- 
sire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution ; 
when the old and the new stand side by side and 
admit of being compared ; when the energies of all 
men are searched by fear and by hope ; when the 
historic glories of the old can be compensated by 
the rich possibilities of the new era ? Tins time, 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 137 

like all times, is a very good one, if we but know 
what to do with it. 

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of 
the coming days, as they glimmer already through 
poetry and art, through philosophy and science, 
through church and state. 

One of these signs is the fact that the same 
movement which effected the elevation of what was 
called the lowest class in the state, assumed in lit- 
erature a very marked and as benign an aspect. 
Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the 
low, the common, was explored and poetized. That 
which had been negligently trodden under foot by 
those who were harnessing and provisioning them- 
selves for long journeys into far countries, is sud- 
denly found to be richer than all foreign parts. 
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, 
the philosophy of the street, the meaning of house- 
hold life, are the topics of the time. It is a great 
stride. It is a sign, — is it not ? of new vigor 
when the extremities are made active, when cur- 
rents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. 
I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ^ 
what is doing in Italy or Arabia ; what is Greek 
art, or Provengal minstrelsy ; I embrace the com- 
mon, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, 
the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you 
may have the antique and future worlds. What 



138 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

would we really know the meaning of ? The meal 
in the firkin ; the milk in the pan ; the ballad in 
the street ; the news of the boat ; the glance of the 
eye ; the form and the gait of the body ; — show 
me the ultimate reason of these matters ; show me 
the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause 
lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs 
and extremities of nature ; let me see every trifle 
bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly 
on an eternal law ; and the shop, the plough, and 
the ledger referred to the like cause by which light 
undulates and poets sing ; — and the world lies no 
longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has 
form and order ; there is no trifle, there is no puz- 
zle, but one design unites and animates the far- 
thest pinnacle and the lowest trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, 
Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, 
Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have 
differently followed and with various success. In 
contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of 
Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. 
This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to 
find that things near are not less beautiful and 
wondrous than things remote. The near explains 
the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is 
related to all nature. This perception of the worth 
of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. I39 

this very thing the most modern of the moderns, 
has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the 
ancients. 

There is one man of genius who has done much 
for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has 
never yet been rightly estimated; — I mean Enian* 
uel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, 
yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, 
he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical 
Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. 
Such an attempt of course must have difficulty 
which no genius could surmount. But he saw and 
showed the connection between nature and the af- 
fections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic 
or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tand- 
ble world. Especially did his shade-loving muse 
hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature ; 
he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral 
evil to the foul material forms, and has given in 
epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of 
unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an 
analogous political movement, is the new impor- 
tance given to the single person. Every tiling that 
tends to insulate the individual, — to surround him 
with barriers of natural respect, so that each man 
shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with 
man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state, 



140 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

— tends to true union as well as greatness. " I 
learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, " that no 
man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to 
help any other man." Help must come from the 
bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must 
take up into himself all the ability of the time, all 
the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the 
future. He must be an university of knowledges. 
If there be one lesson more than another which 
should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, 
the man is all ; in yourself is the law of all na- 
ture, and you know not yet how a globule of sap 
ascends ; in yourself slumbers the whole of Rea- 
son ; it is for you to know all ; it is for you to dare 
all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confi- 
dence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by 
all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, 
to the American Scholar. • We have listened too 
long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit 
of the American freeman is already suspected to 
be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private ava- 
rice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The 
scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See al- 
ready the tragic consequence. The mind of this 
country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon it- 
self. There is no work for any but the decorous 
and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest 
promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 141 

by the mountain winds, sinned upon by all the stars 
of God, find the earth below not in unison with 
these, but are hindered from action by the disgust 
which the principles on which business is man 
aged inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, 
some of them suicides. What is the remedy ? 
They did not yet see, and thousands of young men 
as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the 
career do not yet see, that if the single man plant 
himself indomitably on his instincts, and there 
abide, the huge world will come round to him. 
Patience, — patience ; with the shades of all the 
good and great for company ; and for solace the 
perspective of your own infinite life ; and for work 
the study and the communication of principles, 
the making those instincts prevalent, the conver- 
sion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace 
in the world, not to be an unit ; — not to be reck- 
oned one character ; — not to yield that peculiar 
fruit which each man was created to bear, but to 
be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the 
thousand, of the party, the section, to which we be- 
long ; and our opinion predicted geographically, as 
the north, or the south ? Not so, brothers and 
friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We 
will walk on our own feet ; we will work with our 
own hands ; we will speak our own minds. The 
study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, 



142 TEE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 

for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread 
of man and the love of man shall be a wall of de- 
fence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of 
men will for the first time exist, because each be- 
lieves himself inspired by the Divine Soul which 
also inspires all men. 



The Riverside School Library. 

c4MK2o 

Under this general name are published, in firm and 
attractive style, yet at moderate prices, a series of vol- 
umes peculiarly suited for School Libraries. They are 
chosen largely from the best literature which has stood 
the test of the world's judgment, and yet is as fresh and 
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In the selection of the volumes comprising this Library 
the publishers have been assisted by more than one hun- 
dred of the best educators of American youth. 

The volumes are edited with great care, and contain 
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notes and glossaries wherever needed. They are thor- 
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It is believed that the use of this series will give a 
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Pilgrim's Progress, The. By John Bunyan. (See 
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&t\)ersttie ^cfjooi iLtljrar^ 

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*** All the books named are i6mo in size, except when otherwise indicated 

For a full alphabetical list of the authors whose books are included 
in this series, see the last page of this catalogue. 



Andersen, Hans Christian, Stones by. With a Por- 
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Arabian Nights, Tales from the. In preparation. 
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1 



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Whittier. With Frontispiece Illustration. 196 pp., 50 

cents. 

Mr. Whittier, aided by Miss Larcom, made two considerable 

2 



collections of poetry and prose, from the writings of well- 
known authors. The present volume contains the choicest 
of these selections, with a view to meeting the needs of the 
younger readers. 

Children's Hour, The, and Other Poems. By 
Henry Wads worth Longfellow. With Biographi- 
cal Sketch, Notes, Portrait, and Illustrations. 260 pp. 
60 cents. 

In this volume are gathered the most popular of Long- 
fellow's shorter poems, beginning with those most familiar and 
easy and proceeding to the more scholarly. It is a wide range 
which takes in The Children's Hour, Paul Revere's Ride, and 
The Building of the Ship. 

Christmas Carol, A, and The Cricket on the Hearth. 

By Charles Dickens. With a Sketch of the life oi 

Dickens, and a Portrait. 230 pp., 50 cents. 

These two stories are the most famous and delightful of the 

celebrated Chritmas books by Dickens, which fifty years ago 

made a new form in English Literature. 

Enoch Arden, The Coming of Arthur, and Other 
Poems. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson. With Intro- 
ductions, Notes, Picture of Lord Tennyson's Home, 
and a Portrait. 223 pp., 50 cents. 

Lord Tennyson's story of Enoch Arden has struck deep into 
the heart of a generation of readers, and the poems which are 
grouped with it include four of the famous Idylls of the King. 

Essays and Poems. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. /// 

preparation. 

Evangeline, Hiawatha, and the Courtship of Miles 
Standish. With a Sketch of the Life and Writings of 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, " Longfellow in Home 
Life" by Alice M. Longfellow, Explanatory Notes, Por- 
trait, Map, and Illustrations. 396 pp., 60 cents. 
The three long narrative poems by which the poet is best 

known are brought together in a single volume, and fully 

equipped with the needful history of the poet and his works, 

and such aids as the interested reader desires. 

Fables and Folk Stories. By Horace E. Scudder. 
With Frontispiece Illustration. 200 pp., 50 cents. 
3 



The most familiar fables, chiefly from ALsop, and the most 
famous folk stories, such as Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, 
Little Red Riding Hood, Tom Thumb, Dick Whittington and 
his Cat, Puss in" Boots, Jack and the Bean Stalk, told over 
again in language simple enough for those who are reading in 
the second reader. Millais's Cinderella furnishes the frontis- 
piece. 

Franklin's Autobiography. With a Sketch of his 

Life from the point where the Autobiography closes. 

With three Illustrations, a Map, and a Chronological 

Table. 260 pp., 50 cents. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote many letters and scientific treatises, 
but his Autobiography will outlive them all, for it will continue 
to be read with delight by all Americans, when his other writ- 
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of the world's great books, in which a great man tells simply 
and easily the story of his own life. Franklin brought the 
story down to his fiftieth year. The remainder is told chiefly 
through his letters. A chronological table gives a survey of 
"the events in his life and the great historical events occurring 
in his lifetime. An introductory note gives the history of this 
famous book. 

German Household Tales. By the Brothers Grimm. 
In pi-eparation. 

Grandfather's Chair, or, True Stories from New 
England History ; and Biographical Stories. By 

Nathaniel Hawthorne. With a Biographical Sketch 

and Portrait, Notes and Illustrations. i2mo, 332 pp., 

70 cents. 

This is one of the most delightful books for beginners in 
history in our literature. The great romancer never was so 
happy as when he was writing for the young, and the book 
has been enriched by many pictures and a map. In addition 
also to Grandfather's Chair, the volume contains half a dozen 
biographical stories by Hawthorne in the same vein. 

Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle, and 
Other Verse and Prose. By Oliver Wendell 
Holmes. With Biographical Sketch, Notes, Portrait, 
and Illustrations. 190 pp., 50 cents. 
The spirited ballads and humorous poems of Dr. Holmes, 

together with his animated narrative of My Hunt after the 

Captain, and other prose papers. 

4 



Gulliver's Travels. The Voyages to Lilliput and Brob- 

dingnag. By Jonathan Swift. With Introductory 

Sketch, Notes, Portrait, and two Maps. 193 pp., 50 cents. 

These famous Voyages give one the entertainment caused 
by looking first through one end, then through the other, of a 
spy-glass, and the glass is always turned on men and women, 
so that we see them first as pygmies, and afterward as giants. 
The Introductory Sketch gives an account of Dean Swift and 
his writings, and there are two curiously fanciful maps copied 
from an early edition. 
Holland, Brave Little, and What She Taught Us. 

By William Elliot Griffis. With a Map and four 

Illustrations. 266 pp., 60 cents. 

A rapid survey of the development of Holland with special 
reference to the part which the country has played in the 
struggle for constitutional liberty and to the association of 
Holland with the United States of America. 
House of the Seven Gables, The. By Nathaniel 

Hawthorne. With Introductory Sketch, Picture of 

Hawthorne's Birthplace, and Portrait. i2mo. 384 pp., 

70 cents. 

This romance is instinct with the feeling for old Salem, and 
it embodies some of Hawthorne's most graceful fancies, as in 
the chapter entitled The Pyncheon Garden. The Introduc- 
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Ivanhoe. By Sir Walter Scott. With a Biographical 

Sketch and Notes, a Portrait and other Illustrations. 

121110. 529 pp., 70 cents. 

One of the great Waverley novels. It is hard to say which 
is the most popular of Scott's novels. Every reader has his 
favorite, but the fact that Ivanhoe has been selected as a book 
to be read by students preparing for college shows the estimate 
in which it is held by teachers. 
Japanese Interior, A. By Alice Mabel Bacon. With 

Biographical Sketch. 294 pp., 60 cents. 

Miss Bacon was for some time an American teacher in a 
school in Japan to which daughters of the nobility were sent. 
Her own life and her acquaintance gave her exceptional oppor- 
tunities for seeing the inside of houses and the private life of 
the Japanese, and in this volume she gives a clear account of 
her observation and experience. 

5 



Lady of the Lake, The. By Sir Walter Scott. 
With a Sketch of Scott's life, and thirty-three Illustra- 
tions. 275 pp., 60 cents. 

This poem by Scott is almost always the first one to be 
read when Scott is taken up, and the picturesqueness, move- 
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illustrations are careful stories from the scenes of the poem. 

Last of the Mohicans, The. By James Fenimore 
Cooper. With an Introduction by Susan Fenimore 
Cooper, Biographical Sketch, Notes, Portrait, and two 
other Illustrations. i2mo. 471 pp., 70 cents." 
This is one of the most popular of Cooper's Leather-Stock- 
ing Tales. The scene is laid during the French and Indian 
war, and the story contains those portraitures of Indians and 
hunters which have fixed in the minds of men the characteris- 
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to the reader, and Miss Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of 
the novelist, gives an interesting account of the growth of this 
story. 

Lilliput and Brobdingnag, The Voyages to. See 

Gulliver's Travels. 

Milton's Minor Poems and Three Books of Para- 
dise Lost. With Biographical Sketch, Introductions, 
Notes, and Portrait. 206 pp., 50 cents. 
The great poems by which John Milton is known, L' Allegro, 
II Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and a selection of sonnets, are 
followed by the first three books of his epic. The introductions 
and notes offer aids to a clear interpretation and true enjoy- 
ment of the author. 

New England Girlhood, A, Outlined from Memory. 
By Lucy Larcom. With Introductory Sketch and Por- 
trait. 280 pp., 60 cents. 

Miss Larcom has here told the story of her early life, when 
as a country girl she entered the mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, 
and she has drawn a picture of New England in the middle of 
the century as she knew it, scarcely to be found in any other 
book. The narrative is a delightful bit of autobiography, and 
has a charm both poetic and personal. 

6 



Pilgrim's Progress, The. By John Bunyan. In pre- 
paration. 

Polly Oliver's Problem. By Kate Douglas Wiggin. 

With Introductory Sketch, Portrait, and Illustrations. 

230 pp., 60 cents. 

A story for girls, showing how a girl in straitened circum- 
stances bravely worked out the problem of self-support. 

Rab and his Friends ; and Other Dogs and Men. By 
Dr. John Brown. With an Outline Sketch of Dr. 
Brown, and a Portrait. 299 pp., 60 cents. 
The touching story of Rab and his Friends has introduced 
many readers to the beautiful character of Dr. John Brown, 
the Edinburgh physician who wrote the tale, and in this vol- 
ume are gathered a number of Dr. Brown's sketches and tales, 
including Marjorie Fleming, and several bright narratives of 
dogs. 

Robinson Crusoe. By Daniel Defoe. With an In- 
troductory Sketch and Portrait of the author, a Map, 
and explanatory Notes. 409 pp., 60 cents. 
The first part of Robinson Crusoe is here given entire, and 
this is the part which the world knows as Robinson Crusoe. 
In the introductory sketch, the editor, besides giving an ac- 
count of Defoe's career, shows the reason why this book has 
been received by readers old and young as a work of genius, 
when almost the whole of the great mass of Defoe's writing 
has been forgotten. A map enables one to trace Robinson 
Crusoe's imaginary voyagings and to place the island near the 
disputed boundary of Venezuela. 

Shakespeare, Tales from. By Charles and Mary 
Lamb. With an Introductory Sketch and Portraits of 
the authors. 324 pp., 60 cents. 

There is a story behind every great play, and it is only after 
one has got at the story that one thoroughly understands and 
enjoys the play. Charles and Mary Lamb were themselves 
delightful writers, and to read their Tales from Shakespeare 
is not only to have a capital introduction to the great drama- 
tist's works, but to hear fine stories finely told. This volume 
contains, besides, an account of the brother and sister, whose 
life together is one of the most touching tales in English Lit- 
erature. 

7 



Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and As You Like It. 

With Introductions and Notes. 224 pp., 50 cents. 

The text followed is that of the eminent Shakespearian 
scholar, Richard Grant White, whose notes, always to the 
point, have also been used and added to. 
Silas Marner : the Weaver of Raveloe. By George 

Eliot. With an Introduction and a Portrait. 251 pp., 

50 cents. 

Silas Marner is one of the most perfect novels on a small 
scale in the English language, and its charm resides both in 
its style and its fine development of character. The introduc- 
tion treats of the life and career of George Eliot, and the place 
she occupies in English Literature. 
Sketch Book, Essays from the. By Washington 

Irving. With Biographical Sketch and Chronological 

Table of the Period covered by Irving's Life, Portrait, 

Picture of Westminster Abbey, Introduction, and Notes. 

212 pp., 50 cents. 

In a nearly equal division, the most interesting American 
and Eastern sketches from Irving's Sketch Book are grouped 
in this volume, including Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of 
Sleepy Hollow, Rural Life in England, Christmas Day, and 
Westminster Abbey. 
Snow-Bound, The Tent on the Beach and Other 

Poems. By John Greenleaf Whittier. With Bio* 

graphical Sketch, Notes, Portrait, and Illustrations. 

270 pp., 60 cents. 

This volume contains those poems which have made Whit- 
tier a great household poet, as well as a few of those stirring 
lyrics which recall his strong voice for freedom. 
Stories and Poems for Children. By Celia Thax- 

ter. With Biographical Sketch and Portrait. 271 

pp., 60 cents. 

Mrs. Thaxter's girlhood in her isolated home on the Isles of 
Shoals and her life there on her return in maturity gave her mate- 
rial which she used with power and beauty in her verse and prose. 
Stories from Old English Poetry. By Abby Sage 

Richardson. 291 pp., 60 cents. 

A group of stories after the manner of Lamb's Tales from 
Shakespeare, drawn from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and 



some of the lesser poets, not now generally read ; stories of 

great beauty in themselves, and illuminated by the genius of 

the poets who used them. 

Story of a Bad Boy, The. By Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich. With Biographical Sketch, Portrait, and 
many Illustrations. 121110. 264 pp., 70 cents. 
A humorous and graphic story of the adventures of a hearty 

American boy living in an old seaport town. The book has been 

a great favorite with a generation of boys. 

Tales of a Wayside Inn. By Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow. With Introduction, Notes, and Illus- 
trations. 274 pp., 60 cents. 

In the Introduction the reader is told who were the friends 
of the poet who served as models for the several story-tellers 
that gathered about Howe's tavern in Sudbury. The tales 
include such famous stories as Paul Revere's Ride, Lady 
Wentworth, and The Birds of Killingworth. 

Tales of New England. By Sarah Orne Jewett. 

With Portrait and Biographical Sketch of the author. 

280 pp., 60 cents. 

Eight of the stories which show Miss Jewett as the sympa- 
thetic narrator of homely New England country life. The 
stories are Miss Tempy's Watchers; The Dulham Ladies; An 
Only Son; Marsh Rosemary; A White Heron; Law Lane; 
A Lost Lover; The Courting of Sister Wisby. 

Tom Brown's School Days. By Thomas Hughes. 

With an Introductory Sketch, two Portraits, and six 

other Illustrations. 390 pp., 60 cents. 

Tom Brown at Rugby is the popular name by which this 
book is known. It is perhaps the best read story of school- 
boy life in the English language. Rugby was the English 
school presided over by Dr. Thomas Arnold, and a portrait of 
Arnold is given. The 'introductory sketch gives an account of 
Arnold and Rugby, of Thomas Hughes, the " Old Boy" who 
wrote the book, and mentions Frederic Denison Maurice, who 
had a great influence over Hughes. The volume contains por- 
traits of Hughes and Dr. Arnold. 

Two Years Before the Mast. By Richard Henry 
Dana, Jr. With Biographical Sketch and Portrait. 
1 2 mo. 480 pp., 70 cents. 
9 



As a frontispiece to this book there is a portrait of the au- 
thor when he took his famous voyage just after leaving college. 
But great as Dana was as a lawyer, orator and statesman, he 
lives chiefly in the memory of men as the narrator of a voyage 
round Cape Horn to San Francisco before the discovery of 
gold. The clays of such exploits seem gone by, but this book 
remains as a literary record and will always be thus re- 
membered. 
Uncle Tom's Cabin ; or, Life among the Lowly. By 

Harriet Beecher Stowe. With Introductory chapter 

on Mrs. Stowe and her career, Portrait, and picture of 

Mrs. Stowe's birthplace. i2ino. 518 pp., 70 cents. 

The most celebrated American book, and one of the world's 
great books. The introductory chapter gives a" sketch of Mrs 
Stowe's life, and some account of a book which has had a won- 
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great deed. 
Vicar of Wakefield, The. By Oliver Goldsmith. 

With Introduction, Notes, Portrait, and Illustrations. 

232 pp., 50 cents. 

So celebrated is this book as a piece of English that German 
boys, when set to studying the English language, are early 
given this tale. It is Goldsmith's one story, and has outlived 
a vast number of novels written in his day. 
Vision of Sir Launfal, The, Under the Old Elm, 

and Other Poems. By James Russell Lowell. 

With Biographical Sketch, Portrait, and Elmwood, 

Lowell's Home in Cambridge. 202 pp., 60 cents. 

The volume contains, besides the famous Sir Launfal, the 
great odes called out by the War for the Union and by the cen- 
tennial observance of 1875, an example of the Biglow Papers, 
the poem on Agassiz, The Courtin', and a number of the well- 
known shorter lyrics. 
War of Independence, The. By John Fiske. With 

Biographical Sketch, Portrait of the author, and four 

Maps. 214 pp., 60 cents. 

Dr. John Fiske is the most eminent of living American 
historians. His large histories are read eagerly, as he adds 

so 



volume to volume, and in time it is hoped that he will cover 
the whole course of American history. This small book con- 
tains in a nutshell the meat of a great book. It is a clear 
narrative, and what is quite as important it gives the why and 
wherefore of the revolution, and explains how one event led to 
another. It contains also suggestions for collateral reading 
and a biographical sketch which gives some notion of the 
author's training as a scholar and author. 
Washington, George. An Historical Biography. By 

Horace E. Scudder. With four Illustrations. 253 pp., 

60 cents. 

Within a brief compass Mr. Scudder has attempted to give 
the narrative of Washington's life, and to show that he was a 
living, breathing man, and not, as some seem to think him, a 
marble statue. He calls his book an historical biography be- 
cause he has tried to show the figure in its relation to the great 
events of American history in which it was set. 

Wonder-Book, The, and Tanglewood Tales. For 

Girls and Boys. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. With 

Biographical Sketch, and Frontispiece by Walter 

Crane. i2mo, 419 pp., 70 cents. 

The old Greek myths told over again by the greatest of 
American romancers. Here are the stories such as The 
Gorgon's Head, The Argonauts, the Dragon's Teeth, Midas, 
The Three Golden Apples, which in allusion or reference con- 
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A Companion Volume to the Masterpieces of America* 
Literature. 

masterpieces of 'British literature* 

12mo, 480 pages, $1.00, net, postpaid. 
With a portrait of each author. 

Ruskin : Biographical Sketch ; The King of the Golden River. 

Macaulay : Biographical Sketch ; Horatius. 

Dr. John Brown: Biographical Sketch; Rab and his Friends; Our 
Dogs. 

Tennyson: Biographical Sketch; Enoch Arden ; The Charge of thf 
Light Brigade ; The Death of the Old Year ; Crossing the Bar. 

Dickens: Biographical Sketch; The Seven Poor Travellers. 

Wordsworth: Biographical Sketch; We are Seven; The Pet Lamb, 
The Reverie of Poor Sasan; To a Skylark; To the Cuckoo; She was a 
Phantom of Delight; Three Years she Grew ; She Dwelt among the Un- 
trodden Ways; Daffodils; To the Daisy; Yarrow Unvisited; Stepping 
Westward; Sonnet, composed upon Westminster Bridge; To Sleep; It is 
a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free ; Extempore Effusion upon the Death 
of James Hogg; Resolution and Independence. 

Burns: Biographical Sketch; The Cotter's Saturday Night; To a 
Mouse; To a Mountain Daisy; A Bard's Epitaph; Songs: For A' That and 
A' That; Auld Lang Syne; My Father was a Farmer; John Anderson; 
Flow Gently, Sweet Afton; Highland Mary; To Mary in Heaven; I Love 
my Jean; Oh, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast; A Red, Red Rose; Mary 
Morison; Wandering Willie; My Nannie's Awa'; Bonnie Doon; My 
Heart 's in the Highlands. 

Lamb: Biographical Sketch; Essays of Elia: Dream Children, A Rev- 
erie; A Dissertation upon Roast Pig; Barbara S ; Old China. 

Coleridge: Biographical Sketch; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; 
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream. 

Byron: Biographical Sketch; The Prisoner of Chillon; Sonnet; Fare 
Thee Well; She Walks in Beauty; The Destruction of Sennacherib. 

Cowper: Biographical Sketch; The Diverting History of John Gilpin; 
On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture ; On the Loss of the Royal George ; 
Verses supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk; Epitaph on a Hare; 
The Treatment of his Hares. 

Gray: Biographical Sketch; Elegy, written in a Country Churchyard; 
On a Distant Prospect of Eton College. 

Goldsmith: Biographical Sketch; The Deserted Village. 

Sir Roger de Coverley Papers : Introduction ; The Spectator's 
Account of Himself; The Club; Sir Roger at his Country House; The 
Coverley Household; Will Wimble ; Death of Sir Roger de Coverley. 

Milton: Biographical Sketch; L' Allegro ; II Penseroso - Lycidas. 

Bacon: Biographical Sketch; Bacon's Essays: Of Travel; of Studfou 
of Suspicion; of Negotiating; of Masques and Triumphs. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 

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ADDITIONAL INEXPENSIVE BOOKS 

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Fiske's Civil Government in the United States. Each 
$1.00, net. 

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ROLFE'S STUDENTS' SERIES OF STANDARD 
ENGLISH POEMS for Schools and Colleges. Edited 
by W. J. Rolfe, Litt. D., and containing complete poems 
by Scott, Tennyson, Byron, and Morris. With a 
carefully revised text, copious explanatory and critical 
notes, and numerous illustrations. 1 1 volumes, square 
i6mo. Price per volume, 75 cents. To teachers, by- 
mail, 53 cents, net. 
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^ 



A Condensed List of the Riverside School Library 

Description of these fifty books will be found hi the preceding pages 

Cents. 

Aldrich. The Story of a Bad Boy 7 o 

Andersen. Stories 50 

Arabian Nights, Tales from the.* 50 

Bacon. A Japanese Interior 60 

Brown, John. Rab and his Friends ; and Other Dogs and Men 60 

Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress 50 

Burroughs. Birds and Bees, and Other Studies in Nature 60 

Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans 70 

Dana. Two Years Before the Mast 70 

Defoe . Robinson Crusoe 60 

Dickens. A Christmas Carol, and The Cricket on the Hearth 50 

Eliot, George. Silas Marner \ 50 

Emerson. Poems and Essays 60 

Fiske. The War of Independence .60 

Franklin. Autobiography 50 

Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield : 5 o 

Griffis. Brave Little Holland 60 

Grimm. German Household Tales 50 

Hawthorne. Grandfather's Chair, or, True Stories from New England History ; 

and Biographical Stories 70 

" The House of the Seven Gables 70 

" The Wonder-Book, and Tanglewood Tales 70 

Holmes. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table 60 

" Grandmother's Story, and Other Verse and Prose 50 

Hughes. Tom Brown's School Days 60 

Irving. Essays from the Sketch Book 50 

Jewett, Sarah Orne. Tales of New England 60 

Lamb. Tales from Shakespeare 60 

Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood 60 

Longfellow. The Children's Hour, and Other Poems 60 

" Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish 60 

" Tales of a Wayside Inn 60 

Lowell. The Vision of Sir Launfal, and Other Poems 60 

Miller, Olive Thorne. Bird-Ways 60 

Milton. Minor Poems, and Books I.-III. of Paradise Lost 50 

Parton. Captains of Industry, First Series 60 

" Captains of Industry, Second Series 60 

Richardson, Abby Sage. Stories from Old English Poetry 60 

Scott. Ivanhoe 70 

" The Lady of the Lake 60 

Scudder. Fables and Folk Stories 50 

" George Washington 60 

Shakespeare. Julius Caesar, and As You Like It 50 

Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin 70 

Swift. Gulliver's Voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag 50 

Tennyson. Enoch Arden, The Coming of Arthur, and Other Poems 50 

Thaxter, Celia. Stories and Poems for Children 60 

Warner. Being a Boy 60 

Whittier. Selections from Child Life in Poetry and Prose 56 

Snow-Bound ( The Tent on the Beach, and Other Poems 60 

Wiggin, Kate Douglas. Polly Oliver's Problem 60 

* In press, for immediate issue. August I, 18Q7. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston, New York, Chicago 



JAN 2 3 1924 



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